AGBU Armenia to Host International Conference on Gender and Post-Genocide

YEREVAN — The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) will host a three-day international conference “After Genocide: From Trauma to Rebirth, a Gendered Perspective” on Saturday, September 17 to Monday, September 19 at AGBU Armenia Hall in Yerevan.

The conference is organized by conflict and gender think-tank Women in War (France) in partnership with the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of Armenia, DVV International, and AGBU Armenia. The three-day event brings together over fifty speakers from around the world to discuss the gendered nature of personal, political and social consequences of genocide. Feminist thinkers and activists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and lawyers will share differing perspectives on how genocide victims and descendants have been affected by their trauma.

Conference panelists will examine genocides and mass killings, including the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Nanking, Bosnian genocide, Rwandan genocide, mass killings during the Democratic Republic of the Congo Civil War, Cambodian genocide, and mass killings in Central America and the Middle East. The fate of persecuted people today, including Yazidis, Christians in the Middle East and Kurds, will also be examined as will questions on reparations and possibilities of reconciliation in preventing the recurrence of genocide.

This project was made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (France), DVV International, Swedish non-governmental organization Kvinna till Kvinna (Women for Women), and the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN). The conference will be livestreamed at www.agbu.am.

The Exhibit: “Mapping Identity: Figures, Borders, and Nations”
“Mapping Identity: Figures, Borders, and Nations” is a solo exhibition of select works by renowned artist, author and anthropologist Dana Walrath comprised of artists’ books, paintings and works of art on paper. The series consists of handmade books on nine of the genocides of the past 500 years: American Indians, African Americans, Australian Aborigines, Armenians, the Holocaust, Cambodians, Rwandans, Bosnians and the Rohingya people of Myanmar. One of Walrath’s installations in the exhibition, “View from the High Ground,” renders dehumanization—the fourth stage of genocide—as an interactive process. The handmade books are interactive, forcing the viewer to experience dehumanization literally through the sense of touch as participants page through the images. Two of the nine original books—comprised of hand drawings and an old zoology text embedded within slate—will be on view at AGBU along with larger works on paper from Walrath’s “Armenian Maps” series which explores borders, identity and the fetishizing of nationalism.