Prof. Hourig Attarian
in the Department of Education, Concordia University and an affiliate/core member of
the university’s internationally renowned Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling
(COHDS). Anchored in the blurred genre of life history and autobiographical inquiry, her
interdisciplinary work focuses on storying memory and identity through visual and
narrative explorations. In 2008-2009, she was Artist-in-residence for the Oral History &
Performance Group of the CURA project titled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by
War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations at COHDS. The resulting work titled
Stories scorched from the desert sun (a co-authored script for a staged reading with
dramaturge Rachael van Fossen), documented and storied intergenerational narratives of
genocide survivors with an emphasis on women’s and girls’ experiences. Her other
current collaborative research-creation project titled Come wash with us: Seeking home in
story (with Montreal-based multimedia artists Khadija Baker and Shahrzad Arshadi, and
Ottawa-based film scholar Kumru Bilici) seeks to recount stories of mothers, daughters
and granddaughters attempting to come to terms with memories of war and genocide. She
has explored the collaborative process of writing, staging and performing difficult
memories through various scholarly publications and presentations.
Sessions in which Prof. Hourig Attarian participates
Monday 6 June, 2016
Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving memory” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibition about the Armenian and Roma genocides that proposes creative solutions to these museological and scholarly conflicts around commemoration. Our multi-sited event includes two pr...
Sessions in which Prof. Hourig Attarian attends
Friday 3 June, 2016
Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail take place in the former Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, recycled into campus residence and reading rooms by Concordia University, delegates will also have the possibility to discover the video Three Grey Nuns (3 minutes, by Ron Rudin and Phil Lichti. Three Grey Nuns recount their memories of communal life in the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse. Built...
Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such...
Saturday 4 June, 2016
Dans le cadre de cette session, nous souhaitons faire, dans une perspective multidisciplinaire et critique, un état des lieux qui interroge doublement, à la lumière de trois axes que sont la narrativité, la temporalité et la performativité, la patrimonialisation des sujets sensibles tant sur ses rôles, ses formes et ses effets sur les sociétés qui les entreprennent, que sur sa fonction révélatrice d’un monde en changement. L’espace public laisse une place grandissante aux objets, aux li...
Monday 6 June, 2016
Milan Tanedjikov (Concordia University) and six LaSalle College students. A Material Culture & Fashion Exhibit June 6 and 7 The garments are part of a collection, titled Odesza, designed by six LaSalle College students under the artistic direction of Milan Tanedjikov. The collection: an artisanal Montreal-based clothing collection that is part of the slow-fashion movement. The clothes are made by hand with environmentally friendly material and workers are ...
Dominique Fontaine / Livia Daza-Paris, A video and photographic installation. (All Day Installation) Livia Daza-Paris presents an investigative work, which considers grief, political displacement and how they inhabit one’s own body and place of dwelling. The visits (of which there were none) Episode N. 2; is a segment being developed in Montreal as part of On Antigone Steps: poetic forensics of t...
Le patrimoine fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’attentions autant que d’agressions et de destructions. Cela peut s’expliquer par les difficultés de son identification ou de sa conservation. Cela peut plus profondément s’expliquer parce que, dès le départ, il célébre un événement ou conserve une mémoire qui peut être ou devenir une source de dissenssions et de conflits politiques. Enfin, sa reconnaissance suscite des gains économiques pour les uns mais des pertes pour les autres. Mais peut-être...
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
In exploring the broader question “What does heritage change?” this session presents work that is extending heritage policies and practices beyond elite cultural narratives. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and drawing from case studies around the world, the presenters explore contexts in which stakeholders’ perspectives and choices have been catalysts for change, democratized knowledge, or exposed gaps in contemporary heritage practices. The case studies reveal complex and often conte...
Photography was recognized as an instrument of heritage preservation from the moment of its inception in the early nineteenth century, when projects such as Les Excursions Daguerriennes (1841-1843), a set of Romantic engravings of monuments based on photographic documents, established the links between sight and science, memory and history, hortatory reification and ‘ruin lust’ (Brian Dillon, 2014). This session was conceived in the certain knowledge that almost every speaker at t...
Milan Tanedjikov (Concordia University) and six LaSalle College students. A Material Culture & Fashion Exhibit June 6 and 7 The garments are part of a collection, titled Odesza, designed by six LaSalle College students under the artistic direction of Milan Tanedjikov. The collection: an artisanal Montreal-based clothing collection that is part of the slow-fashion movement. The clothes are made by hand with environmentally friendly material and workers are ...
In November 2014, artists and thinkers including Jimmie Durham, Michael Taussig, Rebecca Belmore and Paul Chaat Smith convened in Calgary and Saskatoon for “Stronger than stone: (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument,” an international symposium which served to foreground the most critical issues facing Indigenous memory-making and cultural preservation today. Propositions for new types of monuments (or anti- monuments in many cases) were made that were specific to the Indigenous worldview and...
Nyata Nyata (Karla Etienne and Zab Mabongou) This hybrid demonstration project explores the links between heritage and artistic creation that is revealed in practice. Interspersed in the presentation will be extracts of past work and examples of live dance created for this occasion with dancers and drummers. Zab Maboungou and Nyata Nyata are a contemporary dance company that is unique in Montreal and in Canada. Cette conférence-démonstration, d'une durée...
An experiment in moving memory, this live event bridges public and academic space to re-imagine knowledge exchange, creation and impact. Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving Memory: difficult histories in dialogue” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibiti...