This project processes the artist’s family’s history of displacement and diaspora through elementa changes that occur when salt, water, and wood frame a past that remains ungraspable. This installation’s ethos came from a recently encountered family photo album, whose migratory mapping traverses across the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Armenia), to France, Argentina, and the United States. Keichian’ Armenian born and, later, Argentine citizen grandfather photographed all the source materials for this work. Although they never met, this speculative collaboration draws a warped line between two peopl separated by time, land and sea. The work speaks of presence and absence through an exchange of both tangible and ephemeral temporalities, which move through distance and time. Keichian explores speculative interpretations of what an archive can do, rather than limiting memory to representatio defined by familial trauma. This exhibition plays with many unknowns that cling to the artist’s genealogy, giving a bent look through salt in their eye as they try to traverse oceans of time. This work is a speculative dip into the negatives that make up Keichian’s family’s history, looking askew to find queer stances and lost topographies.
This work has been shown in multiple iterations.
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Table Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2019 Images: Kim Becker
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Tactics of Erasure and Rewriting Histories, installation view, 2022. Courtesy of Craft Contemporary
Photos: Josh Schaedel
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ReflectSpace, 2023, Glendale Central Library, Glendale, CA
