My artistic act is closely linked to the history of my country, it is nourished by the need to initiate a work of memory within an amnesic culture. This exhibition was born from the first drawings I made after Hrant Dink’s death in 2007.

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It was at the very beginning the desire to open the Pandora’s box that Hrant had shown during his lifetime, to me as to all those who were ready to accept this discovery.

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The deportation and the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 constitute the core of the exhibition; even if we find that in other places, at other times, the persecution is always the same.

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The photographs I have collected, the testimonies I have listened to, the feelings and reactions of each other, the controversies, all this has been transmuted into art in drawings, in spots and in blackness. I use different techniques and supports: pencil, ink, gouache, linoleum, canvas, handmade paper.

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I have integrated in my artistic expression the march of men, displaced by force, torn from their homes, doomed to darkness and nothingness because of the 2011 civil war in Syria, and because of several conflicts, including Kurds one, in my country.

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Arzu Başaran