Welcome

TO A COMMUNITY IN THE MAKING

Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire involved thirteen newly produced research-based artistic collaborations that opened at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in November of 2010. By instigating encounters among the distanced or perceived others of the post Ottoman geography, the project’s founding co-curators Neery Melkonian and Defne Ayas asked ‘match-made’ artists to explore the lingering effects of that historical rupture on life today. To inform the curatorial process, which began to develop in fall 2005, a series of informal conversations were hosted, by friends of the project, which in turn formed the basis of thematically organized public discussions held at various venues internationally. Co-produced with Pratt, the project brought together artists and other practitioners from Armenia, Bosnia, Greece, Israel,Lebanon, and Turkey with their transnational or diasporic counterparts in Europe and the United States. At the heart of the Pratt exhibition one could find attachments to images, voices, and histories that collide with existing taxonomies of nation-states, art histories, and identities. On view were a cluster of sensibilities that nest at the verge of remembering and forgetting, truth and fiction, real and imaginary.

Currently this website outlines the journey of making the Pratt Institute exhibit. En-route to its planned Istanbul<>Yerevan editions the Strategies of (Un) Silencing (SoUS) conference was held at the American University of Armenia in October, 2012. With fifteen international participants, and novelist Amitav Ghosh as keynote speaker, the gathering opened up the debate to parallel or similar ruptures. For program details please see here.