The Illini Union Art Gallery is hosting a photography exhibit titled iWitness from mid-April through May 2025. A collaboration with the Initiative of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) at the U of I, headed by Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan, this event commemorates the Armenian Genocide and features the work of Ara Oshagan. Ara Oshagan is a Los Angeles-based artist and curator who has worked in multidisciplinary visual arts and culture. His skills range from photography, filmmaking, and art installations to digital collage and print, which speak to issues of genocide, violence, memory, trauma, and displacement. Born in the SWANA region, Oshagan is of Armenian descent, and his artwork narrates the pain and dispossession of people across conflict zones.
Oshagan’s project, a collaboration with Levon Parian, an artist and Adjunct Professor at California State University, Northridge, was conceived in the mid-1990s in Los Angeles. Architect and artist Vahagn Thomasian joined later, and they collectively worked on this set, which was exhibited worldwide and seen by thousands of people. iWitness is a collection of portraits of survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, their eyewitness testimonies, and archival images. The three artists are descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, iWitness will also be on display at the Siebel Center for Design, in addition to the Union Art Gallery. The project marks the first-ever full-length coverage of the Armenian Genocide in the United States to receive support from National Public Radio (NPR) and numerous other platforms, including The Los Angeles Times and the US Senate building in Washington, DC. It has been displayed as a 3D installation at the Grand Park, DTLA in 2015 to commemorate the hundredth year of the violent 1915 Armenian genocide. It is also featured on the artist’s website as a 2D photo collage, allowing one to scroll through the webpage.
Oshagan has been driven by his interest in “identity,” and a significant number of his art projects and photographs reflect conversations with the self, regarding who he is and how he orients himself with respect to the world. In one of his photographic projects entitled “Traces of Identity”, based in Los Angeles, he writes, “My identity is amorphous and realizes itself in the in-between spaces, in the passage between the various cultures and languages in me. My identity is liminal and a process.” Some of his other pivotal projects provide insight into borders as legal-political spaces – “Han River Estuary (DMZ)” and “Untitled (DMZ)”, whereas others such as “Fatherland” and “displaced” look at borderlands as zones of dispossession and violence, of fraught history and landscape, of loss and conflict.
The iWitness project presents intense, portrait-style photographs of survivors of the genocide, accompanied by brief witness accounts. Oshagan’s lens often focuses on the survivors’ body parts, such as close shots of their hands or objects they are holding onto, within the frames.
As I stood quietly in front of these portraits, I could see how he focuses on drawing attention to the gaze of the survivors, their emotions, as their stories and experiences are recorded through the expressions on their face, the pattern of their clothes, as well as the folds and wrinkles on their skin.
I could feel the haunting yet calming quality of the photograph as my eyes met those of the survivors in the photograph. The frames have been mounted in a way that the gaze of the subjects meets the visitors as they stand in the gallery or walk around, reminding them of the existence of a harrowed past amidst the continuation of everyday life. Between the frames, the artists have provided information on the Armenian Genocide, dates that are historically significant, and bibliography lists that interested people can collect for further reading.
The Siebel Center for Design showcases some of the portraits of the survivors around the building, amidst students continuing their everyday activities. Hung as larger-than-life photofabrics, the black and white photos appeal to anyone walking by, to become a witness to that moment and the history it represents.
The iWitness project is interactive and unsettling — qualities that make artworks more complex and interesting to the observer. While some of the photographs present a compelling need to voice their stories, some of the faces embody silence, almost piercing, as the audience looks at the portraits and engages with them.
The photographs stand out, compelling viewers to look at the objects in their hands — other photographs, material objects, and pieces of memory that they have saved from the past. They prompt us to consider the politics of memory and objects when people and their physical existence have been erased from geo-political spaces. They also allow the audience to address concerns about violence and its portrayal through the visual arts, as the black and white photographs by Oshagan capture moments of disjuncture and dispossession, without any visual or graphic manifestation of it.
Whether it is a summer activity that parents would like their children to attend, or a brief interaction with history (the photographs do not display any graphic details of violence, although the story cards discuss discrimination and sexual violence), this exhibit is a compelling event for students and community members alike.
iWitness: Narratives of Survival
Illini Union Art Gallery
1401 W Green St
Urbana
April 10-May 31
Hours: Daily 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Free and open to the public