Silvina Der Meguerditchian

In her series Emptied Words, the artists looks back at her family’s history and collects single Turkish words she remembers from her grandparents, who lost their homes in Anatolia in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide in 1915 and migrated to Argentina. Written on perforated white paper, the series examines the fading memory of a language that is being lost over generations and explores which words, phrases and expressions have survived and why. As the piece in the exhibition indicates, some of the remaining words are tied to emotions, memories and traces of traumas that are difficult to overcome.

The political alliance established between Wilhelmine Germany and the late Venus Ottoman Empire was defined as a “friendship” and was based on the prospect of mutual benefit: Germany’s pursuit of economic and political power in the Near East and the Ottoman dynasty’s struggle for survival. As if mending a spider’s web connected by red thread, Der-Meguerditchian has woven together photographic references depicting the catastrophic consequences of this alliance for the people of the falling empire: damages whose legacy continues through to today.