Lucia Choulakian. Le ciel était d’un bleu éclatant

Le ciel était d’un bleu éclatant is a photographic exhibition that explores, from a gendered perspective, transgenerational trauma within families who experienced the 1915 Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. It sheds light on this transmission, which is conveyed through bodily experience and archival documents.  Drawing on the account of Pailadzo Captanian (1919), the first published testimony of an Armenian survivor, the exhibition recalls the extreme violence inflicted on women during the deportation. As a fourth-generation descendant, the artist returns to the sites of the crimes in Turkey and creates photographic reenactments based on archival images, thereby giving tangible form to the persistence of trauma. The installation recreates the scenography of a room in the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan, where large-format projected images confront the public with their memorial significance. Against a backdrop of denialism, these immaterial images, looping endlessly, explore the complexity of memory and archives.