http://www.inalco.fr/evenement/exposition-imaginary-letters-vasily-grossman
October 4-22, 2021 
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO)
Paris, France

Festival TransCaucases (in French)




Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman: Post-World War II Repatriation to Soviet Armenia


Reflective thoughts in forms of 'letters', based on the interviews with post-WWII Repatriates to Soviet Armenia as they respond to passages in Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook. Author/artist Hazel Antaramian, daughter of repatriates, goes back to Yerevan to visit the place of her birth, more importantly the place where her American and French-born parents met and lived their formative lives before leaving in the mid-1960s. This is the first of two sets of video 'letters' created by the author/artist Hazel Antaramian that came about after her 2016 art exhibition in Yerevan on the subject. The entire set of 'letters' beyond what appears in the videos culminates in written form in 2022.


Imaginary Letters to Vasily Grossman: Post-WWII Repatriation to Soviet Armenia - YouTube




Putting up the Paris Exhibition at
INALCO
October 2021

Installation of the October show

Central Valley Talk: December 2019




Fig Tree Gallery December 2019
GROUP SHOW: Strokes of Genius (Artist with Poet Collaborative) with Marisol Baca




FILM AND PAINTING

Maximum Load -1

2nd Annual Madrid Art Film Festival

September 29, 2017 to September 30, 2017

Madrid Art Film Festival


Maximum Load-1

Movie • 25 min 24 sec • Documentary
Completed Aug 2016

The filmmaker goes back to her birthplace to find a little girl in a photograph taken by a forgotten guide at an ancient settlement museum in Armenia.



Synopsis
In search of a young girl in a black and white photograph taken with the filmmaker in 2006, in ancient settlement of Dvin, Armenia, at the local site museum. Upon the filmmaker's return to her birthplace, after 40 years since her Stalin-era repatriate parents left the Soviet Union in 1965, the image embodies matters of immigration in terms of ‘searching for home,’ lost childhood, and blank memories, as it is framed by current political protests in the Republic of Armenia and the people's search for democracy. These documentary events add to the unfolding of the story of the photograph and the last 70 years of Armenian immigration and emigration, as the prequel to the feature documentary, whose focus looks at Russian-dependence, promised democracy and the persistence of Homo sovieticus.






Fig Tree Gallery


December 2018 Members Group Show


"Poppy"




MARCH 2017 Solo Exhibition at
Fig Tree Gallery 

Art Exhibition
Embroidered Mise-en-Scene

Window on to Kond, 2017

Acrylic on Canvas

Now showing at Fig Tree Gallery


See Fresno Bee Art Picks by Don Munro


VIDEO






Past EXHIBITIONS

644 Van Ness Blvd., Fresno, CA  93721

see Calendar


Former United States Ambassador to Armenia John Marshall Evans under former President George W. Bush at my show on the Armenian Post-World War II Repatriation.




Photographs of 2015 Solo Exhibition Opening 
at Fig Tree Gallery (below)

Wishing Tree: Landscape I and II

2015 



Artist Statement


My drawings and paintings symbolize the 'fragmentation' of displaced people, stemming from issues of cultural identity and the struggle to maintain the continuity of tradition.  At the same time, the works are statements of hope, survival, and spirit.  


I am equally interested in the medium of (digital) film as it offers opportunities of displacement of content and place by way of motion, displacement of content and time by way of thought and memory, and the symbolism behind the storytelling.


See Gallery.





ALL IMAGES ON THIS WEBSITE ARE COPYRIGHT. Please contact me for permission to use any of the imagery (art and photographic).


Image and Text of Post-World War II Armenian Repatriation PROJECT

PHOTO BELOW:  American-Armenians Bobby Maynazarian (left), Paul Antaramian (center), Johnny Kadekian (right) sailing from New York to Soviet Armenia on the Rossiya in 1947.  Photo courtesy of Paul Antaramian.  Antaramian Copyright 2012.

I am fascinated by the historic migration of humans, both forced and voluntary, and the cross-cultural aspects of such social issues.  As a young child I never fully understood my place within this anthropological phenomenon, that is, being born in the Soviet Union to an American-Armenian father and a French-Armenian mother at the height of the cold war.  I have now come to address this part of who I am, through the lives of the post-World War II Armenian repatriates.  My project documents the historic and ethnographic path of Armenians in the Diaspora from the 1940s to the 1960s.  While my parents came from the United States and France, other families came from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, China, among other countries.  


My work is multifaceted, in that it encompasses writing, studio art, and lecture presentations, all inspired by the history of the repatriation, including collected ethnographic photographs and stories from my personal interviews.  I am humbled to hear the stories from those who experienced this time of history and lived under the ruthless regime of Josef Stalin.  During interviews, I was emotionally moved when I saw tears in the eyes of repatriates recounting their stories.  They were the young children and youthful adults, who, at the time, were compelled to leave their hometowns with their families to an unknown Sovietized Armenia.  The movement was not necessarily a "repatriation" since hardly any were born in the small fragment of  Armenia that remained.  Many of those who responded to nationalistic appeals in the late 1940s, which were made by repatriation committees and other organizations, fled the Ottoman Empire during the turn of the 20th century.  Their nostalgic gesture to uproot their "diasporan" families to the land they thought was ancient Armenia was met with despair: psychologically, spiritually, economically, and physically.  

 

This website along with my art and film work memorializes the repatriation history and my past work that included video interviews of repatriates, along with more archival photographs, artwork, and links to other sources on the subject.  I am currently finalizing the last step in my documentation: my writing in published book form in 2019. 


The following provides a brief description of the lecture presentation associated with this project.  Please feel free to contact me about it and include "repatriation lecture" in the subject line:  hazelantaramhof@yahoo.com


Artist and Lecturer: Hazel Antaramian Hofman, M.A., M.Sc.


Approximate Time: 60 minutes


Presentation Format and Content: Illustrated PowerPoint/Video format, the lecture of the ethnographic history of the post-WWII Armenian Repatriation is primarily comprised of selected accounts and biographical information from interviews of surviving repatriates, selected black and white photographs, and archival material.  As an artist, I respond to this history with art, music, but most of all, with the stories and images that I have collected from interviews of repatriates. I use these sources to provide the audience with a unique understanding and appreciation of early cultural life in Soviet Armenia from those who directly experienced this little known historical event during the final years of Stalin's grip on the country.