Banner #1 / #2 / #3 (2023)

fruit leather, plexiglass, concrete.

Warmly
Huidenclub, Rotterdam.
8 February - 9 April 2023

In this group exhibition artists Veronika Babayan, Natacha Mankowski and Natsuko Uchino inquire into topics of ecology, labour, and identity through their respective approaches to craft as a process and the theoretical orientations emanating from it.
The practice of Craft has its roots stemmed deep in the past experiences of women, identified formerly as what was considered ‘feminine’ labour: the embodied, the physical, and often passed down through oral traditions.


Written by Elina Tapio. Full text available upon request.

Realms of PostMemory (2021) 

Video 10”15
fruit leather, plexiglass, wood, laser engraver.

Motherland / Մայրենիք
Yerevan Modern Art Museum
18 - 28 September 2021
Participating artists: Veronika Babayan (Rotterdam), Tatevik Ghukasyan (Moscow), Olga Ganzha (Amsterdam), and masharu (Amsterdam).

“Postmemory”, a term first coined by Marianne Hirsch in the early 1990’s, describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before — to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. The connection to the past that she defines as postmemory is mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present.

Click here to watch the press-interview in Armenian.

My Mother’s Skin Is Made of Mulberries (2021) 

Mulberry fruit leather, cotton thread stitching, edible ink drawing, plexiglass, concrete. 

Mother[hood] - an exhibiton by Veronika Babayan and Olga Ganzha.

The work of the mother is historically kept out of the public sphere, but that doesn’t mean that the Mother[hood] is only as large as her house. What a mother makes becomes economy, what a mother teaches becomes knowledge and what a mother touches becomes society.

Sour Counterfeits 

Installation, 2020

Exhibitions:
COLD SWEAT, De Dood, Zaandam, 2020
That Those Beings Be Not Being, W139, Amsterdam, 2021

Sour Counterfeits is a mobile forgery lab, where fruit leather documents are produced. Using the maternal Armenian tradition of fruit leather making as a mnemonic device for cultural preservation, “Sour Counterfeits” pulls from a larger collective memory, serving as a vessel through which deracinated testimonials of trans-generational trauma circulate beyond territory, language and citizenship.

Dear Mother:
Fluid Mechanism of Belonging

MA THESIS, 2020
Laser engraved fruit leather cover

Taking the form of a passport, this meta-autobiographical memoir, is an internalized investigation of the concept of collective trauma and motherhood. The questions addressed throughout are: How can we allow future generations to devictimize the transnational identity and to create a new, fluid mechanism of belonging? What are the alternative frames of collective memory preservation among diasporic communities who are detached from a nationalized historical identity? And how does maternal care as a mnemonic device affect a child’s identity formation? It emphasizes how maternal nurturance and storytelling affects a child’s transnational identity formation and revolves around a fictional transgenerational interchange between mother and child.