Art and Collective Healing Sarkis Zabunyan and the Politics of Denial

Abstract

Sarkis Zabunyan, one of the prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, was selected to represent the Turkish pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2015. Since 2015 was the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, a genocide that has not been recognized by the Turkish Republic for more than a hundred years, and Sarkis being an Istanbul Armenian born and raised in Turkey, the selection caused quite a stir and sparked a public discussion on art and collective healing when it was announced. As a result, the catalog of Sarkis’s work Respiro was subjected to censorship. Through this censorship case, this article scrutinizes various reconciliation discourses developed in Turkey in the early 2000s regarding the Armenian Genocide and how contemporary art could possibly engage/disengage with those discourses. © 2024 Duke University Press.