2025
Inspired by East Asian narrative forms and medieval Armenian hand scrolls, the Gather, II scroll is constructed from cutouts from photographs by Oshagan of the Armenian diasporic community and beyond in Beirut between 2014 and 2018. The scroll backgrounds are pages from Oshagan’s father Vahe Oshagan’s notebooks—a diasporic poet and novelist who lived and wrote in Beirut in the 1960s and 70s.
The Gather, II scroll envisions a new life for a dispersed community by fragmenting images of their communal and personal spaces and then gathering and re-constituting these fragments into a narrative panorama of life and possibility. Contextualized by a history of genocide and violence, the scrolls also speak to a cyclical process of diasporic placemaking where sustenance and resistance are renewed every generation.
