In one of the most impressive photographs of the Helen Sheehan exhibition at Depo, a Kurdish boy sits on a turquoise wall in the former Armenian quarter in Diyarbakır, looking away dreamily. At the entrance of the adjoining house stands a young woman, looking at the camera with a rather harsh expression on her face. It is as if they belong to different worlds despite their proximity. Another picture shows a mulberry tree at the garden of the St. Giragos church in Diyarbakır. A fountain at the entrance to Zeytun (now renamed Süleymanlı) in the Ciclia region bears witness to a century where societal violence has been the rule rather than the exception. In a fourth photograph we are presented with an abandoned Armenian house, also in Diyarbakır. It has many doors and windows inside but sadly, no one seems to live there anymore.

These are some of the lost landscapes in Helen Sheehan's "Armenian Family Stories and Lost Landscapes" exhibition at Depo, located in a former tobacco warehouse ("Tütün Deposu") in Istanbul's Tophane district. In May 2014, Sheehan had exhibited her photographic sound pieces inside the restored Armenian church of St. Giragos in Diyarbakır. Her interest in Armenia and its diaspora was triggered while working as a teacher in Venice. Sheehan started working on a Ph.D. titled "Contemporary Armenian Exiles, objects narratives, histories" at the London College of Communication in 2009 but could get no funding to continue her studies.

"The Armenian families that I worked with in diaspora in Paris and London, all had these extraordinary links to Diyarbakır in their family histories and this led me to that city and the old Armenian quarter," Sheehan told me.

"I met Seta Tahan Bilezikian who is in her 80s now in Paris and she opened up her family archive about her grandfather Boghos Sarrafian who was one of the famous photographers. What is extraordinary is that in Diyarbakır itself, there is no trace of their existence in that city and yet they had set up the first photographic studio there."

As she explored the traces of the Sarrafian family, Sheehan discovered how Abraham, Boghos and Samuel Sarrafian traveled and recorded pictures of Beirut, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep and Mardin and used them in postcards that proved very popular at the time. "It was extraordinary really because here were these brothers who had taken some of the most beautiful and iconic photographs of the Middle East, were fluent in Arabic, French, Armenian and Turkish and yet their existence was not even registered in the town of their birth."

Sheehan, who has contributed to the BBC World Service, The Independent , AI C2 magazine and Elle Sweden has photographed the destruction of Sarajevo, Mostar and Vukovar in the 1990s. Her photographs were exhibited with Amnesty International in different European cities. But it was the lost landscapes project that had the most lasting impact in her career. She is a recipient of a funding award for this exhibition from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Culture Ireland.

"Seta who retains the family memory spoke with great pride not just about their photographic achievements but also about their work with helping victims of 1915 who came to the Lebanon in desperation or ended up there after the deportations," she said.

"The Sarrafians themselves fled during the pogroms of the Abdülhamid II period in the 1890s. I found the intimacy of their family album as a testament to a disappeared existence which is the case with so many Armenian families. Seta also presented me with a beautiful scarf which is made of silver and gauze net material that her grandmother Anne Tufenkian Sarrafian wore in Diyarbakır. I find these objects very touching and part of the missing social history of the region."

For Sheehan the project also had a personal aspect. As an Irish artist she is painfully aware of the oppression of people and their language by others. "In Ireland we live on the edge of Europe and in our past spoke a different language which is now very much a marginal language in our own country, Irish," she said. "I speak better French and Italian. It is also about not having had a voice as a people in our history, about colonialism and its destruction and consequences. However the resurfacing of memory can also be healing as although we cannot bring back the past, we can look at it through the family archive. In Ireland we now work together peacefully recognizing differences."

"In searching for the Armenian past I am also confronting my own family history as it too resurfaces through the family albums of my cousins and family who live on either side of the border in Ireland," she added.

Kaya Genç :
Daily Sabah, January 24. 2015

İrlandalı fotoğrafçı Helen Sheehan’ın “Ermeni Aileleri ve Kayıp Manzaralar” sergisi DEPO’da gerçekleşen kokteyl ile izleyicilere açıldı.

Fotoğraf projesi Sheehan’ın 1990-1991 yıllarında Venedik’teki St. Lazzaro adasındaki Mekitarist okulunda öğretmen olarak çalıştığı sırada Ermeni aileleriyle tanışmasıyla ilk ortaya çıkıyor. 2009’da önce bir doktora projesi olarak başlayan sonra Ermeni Aileleri ve Kayıp Manzaralar sergisine dönüşen projeyi Sheehan bize şöyle anlatıyor:

Yıkılmış bir yuva ne demek?

“Sadece yıkılmış kiliseler çekmek istemedim. Sürgündekiler için yıkılmış bir yuva ne demek, ne anlama geliyor bunu göstermek istedim. “Ben de sürgündeki bir kültürden geliyorum. Bir sürgün için atalarının baktığı manzarayı görememek, ona erişememek ne anlama geliyor? Bir fotoğrafçı olarak bunu göstermek istedim.” Proje sayesinde yolu Ermenilerin Digranagerd’ına yani Diyarbakır’a düşen Sheehan burayı “Zazaların, Kürtlerin, Alevilerin, Ermenilerin yaşadığı küçük bir Kudüs” olarak tanımlıyor.

"Ermeni kültürü hepimizin"

Ermeni Soykırımı’nın 100. Yılında Anadolu halklarının kendi geçmişlerini keşfetmesi için bir şans olduğunu söyleyen Sheehan şöyle devam ediyor: “Umarım köprüler kurulur, insanlar 1915’te trajik bir şekilde yok edilmiş bir kültürün zenginliğini keşfedebilir. Çünkü Ermeni kültürü hepimizin kültürü.” Sheehan en sevdiği fotoğrafınsa "Ağaç" olduğunu söylüyor: "Çünkü ağaç oradaydı ve ağaç hatırlar. Tanık olduklarını, kaybolan insanları bize anlatır."

Diyarbakırlı fotoğrafçı aile Sarrafianlar

Sergide yer alan fotoğraflar üç Ermeni ailesinin atalarının manzaralarına ait. Sarrafyan, Zoryan ve Zeytun ailelerinin hikayeleri sergide yer alıyor.

Sarrafyanlar Diyarbakırlı fotoğrafçı bir aile. Sheehan’ın kayıp mekanlar kitabına sunuş yazan Dickran Kouymjian, Sarrafyanları şöyle anlatıyor:

“…Kişisel bir perspektiften, Sheehan’ın prototip olarak seçtiği ailelerden biri, esasen Diyarbakırlı bir fotoğrafçı aile olan Sarrafyan ailesidir. Abdülhamit’in pogromlarından da önce, kıskançlık temelli bir nefretle karışık ırksal düşmanlık kaynaklı yıkımlardan kaçışlarını anlatır. Beyrut’ta Sarrafian Freres şirketi sadece portre fotoğrafçılığında değil, tarihi ve arkeolojik yerleri kayıt altına almasıyla ünlenir. Üç kardeş olan Abraham, Bogros ve Samuel tüm bölgeyi dolaşarak anıtları fotoğraflamışlardır. Beyrut ve Diyarbakır’ın yanı sıra Antakya, Antep, Harput, Mardin ve diğer kentleri gösteren kartpostalları hayli ünlenmiştir. Bir dönem Kudüs’te bir mağaza açmışlardır…”

Kouymjian son kuşak Sarrafianlardan Patricia’nın kendi yaşadıklarından ilhamla yazdığı The Bullet Collection kitabına değinerek şöyle devam ediyor:

“Bu kitap hafıza, kayıp topraklar ve ev kavramının yıkılması üzerineydi. Bu temalar, bu serginin de çerçevesini oluşturuyor. Bir paragrafta romanın kahramanı Marianna (aslında Patricia) eski fotoğraflardan oluşan bir albüme bakarken Beyrut’ta genç ve şık bir kadın olarak annesini görür ve şöyle der: ‘Tıpkı onun gibi olabilirdim. Fonda çalan Arap müziğinde öyle güzel dans ederken herkesin durup hayranlıkla baktığı, partilerde etrafını aşıkların sardığı o kadın… Durup bakıyorum. Her şeyin böyle olması gerekirdi.’

“Ancak Helen Sheehan’ın fotoğraflarnda gördüğümüz gibi, ne kadar güzel olursa olsun, hiçbir şey olması gerektiği gibi değil. Esas çelişki, bu gerçeklik ile nasıl yaşayacağımız. Yerle yeksan edilmiş bir ev veya memleket kavramıyla, hafızanın gölgesindeki zihinlerimizle. Veya Patricia Sarrafian Ward’ın Marianna’nın akrabalarından birine söylettiği gibi ‘Geçmiş asla değiştirilemez.’”

Zoryan ve Zeytun ailelerinin hikayelerini, fotoğraflarını ve manzaralarını sergide görmek mümkün.

"Ermeni Aileleri ve Kayıp Manzaralar" sergisi DEPO'da 8 Şubat'a kadar görülebilir.

Soykırımın 100. yılında
Sheehan’ın sergisi DEPO’nun bu yıl Ermenilerle ilgili yapacağı sergilerin ilki. DEPO’da önceki yıllarda da Ermenilerin Anadolu’da yitirilmiş geçmişleri üzerine çeşitli sergiler yer almıştı. Bu sene Ermeni Soykırımı’nın 100. Yılı olması sebebiyle de yurtdışındaki Ermeni sanatçıların ve araştırmacıların da Türkiye’deki izleyicilere seslenebileceği etkinlikler düzenlenecek.

Helen Sheehan
Sheehan foto muhabirlik ve sanatsal ilgilerini 1980’lerde İrlanda’da sanat okurken birleştirdi. Yirmi yıl içinde, diaspora anlatılarına ve özellikle de zorla yerinden edilme deneyimlerine tekrar tekrar döndü. 1990’larda eski Yugoslavya’nın etnik çeşitliliğe sahip kentleri Saraybosna, Vukovar ve Mostar’ın parçalanma süreçlerini fotoğrafladı. Bu çalışma insan hakları meselelerine olan ilgisini perçinledi ve Uluslararası Af Örgütü’yle iş birliği içinde Slovenya, Dublin ve Londra’da sergiler açtı. Diğer işleri arasında, Elle Magazine, The Independent gibi basılı yayınlar için çalışmalar ve BBC Dünya Servisi için radyo programları sayılabilir. Sheehan fotoğraflar ve ses eserlerinden oluşan işlerini, Türkiye’de ilk defa Mayıs 2014’te Anadolu Kültür/Diyarbakır Sanat Merkezinin düzenlediği fotoğraf festivali kapsamında Diyarbakır St. Giragos Ermeni kilisesinde sergilemişti. (EA)

Fotoğraflar: Haluk Kalafat

HELEN SHEEHAN’S ARMENIAN FAMILY STORIES AND LOST LANDSCAPES

Head back towards the Tophane tram stop and, just opposite and inland, the former tobacco warehouse DEPO is hosting an exhibition of the Irish photographer, Helen Sheehan, entitled Armenian Family: Stories and Lost Landscapes.

Sheehan’s works are about memory and loss of homes. Brief family stories of three Armenian families from Diyarbakır and Zeytun (Maraş) together with reproductions of photos from their family albums are juxtaposed alongside photos Sheehan took in those places, mostly focusing on architectural details of sites that were occupied by Armenians and objects which belonged to the families. Sheehan’s emotive and beautiful body of work provides a way of approaching the past through family histories and personal experiences rather than official histories. Works are for sale. Please enquire directly with the artist.

Helen Sheehan

Sheehan says of her project: ‘I examine the objects that remain from [the Armenian families’] ancestral pasts, such as a silver embossed cane candle, a lump of sugar, a family Bible and photos that testify to past experiences. I examine the re-emergence of the past through memory and go to their former towns and villages to photograph what remains. The work opens up a discourse between then and now and explores post-memory in itself.’

What does it mean to live in exile? In the work of Irish photographer Helen Sheehan we see personal histories of descendants of Armenian exiles narrated through photography. In the four sections of the exhibition Sheehan captures images from Eastern Turkey where the Armenians used to live before 1915, Zeytoun, Van, Diyarbakir/ Dikranakerd. Here she explores through sound and projections the traces of their existence. The audience participates in a journey into the past to these places imbued with the communal heritage and memory of the Armenians.

PIVOT POINTS: Turkey England Turkey - New Photography by Helen Sheehan YFBS Gallery, London

For 20 years, Irish photographer Helen Sheehan has been making work that moves between her fine art/installation background and her deep commitment to human rights and to issues of exile and belonging. She has worked on issues of conflict and justice in Belfast, Algeria, France, Bosnia, Croatia and Armenia, and has exhibited in London, Paris, Croatia, Slovenia and the USA.

In Pivot Points, Sheehan shows her latest narrative photomontage work which focuses on two individuals James and Zehra. They are both British citizens based in London, coming from very different yet connected experience.

While Englishman James comes from a materially well-off background, his relationship to the value systems, which led to that wealth, is complex, very critical, and yet also creative. Sheehan’s work with him over some months comes at this tension laterally, juxtaposing imagery of inheritance with his ongoing campaigning on oil and social justice in Eastern Turkey, which Sheehan visited for this project.

Over an intensive period, Sheehan and Zehra worked in London and Istanbul. They explored Zehra’s complicated relationship to her long-term adopted home in London, in light of her family’s persecution for political reasons in the land of her birth, Turkey. Sheehan explores the intensely delicate territory of integration, loyalty, longing, alienation and belonging across the two landscapes that shape her subject’s realities.

The series of photomontages evoke very different lives, yet two lives which grapple with intense complexity about “home”. We get a sense of gaps, of absences, of a kind of searching, yet also of rich, insightful, textured lives. Sheehan’s aesthetic, honed by her years of questioning the borders of photojournalism and art is exquisite and intimate, intense and provoking. These two explorations complete a quartet of subjects started with her work with subjects Pascal and Ali in Paris, exhibited in London and Virginia, USA. Pivot Points was funded by Arts Council England.

LOOKING THROUGH GLASS: Amberdam Gallery, Hampstead, London

In Morocco, one woman dies every three hours from childbirth, you need your husband's permission to open a bank account in your own name, 80 per cent of rural women are illiterate, and a divorce petition - even on grounds of domestic violence - must be supported by a male witness. The whole notion of women's rights always seems as much about human rights to me, so it is appropriate that photojournalist Helen Sheehan should be showing her images of Moroccan women under the Amnesty International banner.

The exhibition of her photographs, at the Amberden Gallery in Hampstead, ranges from eye-curdling images of abuse to strong, evocative pictures of subjects who, above all obviously trust her. There is always something unsettling about a Western observer, or tourist, going to a country and returning clutching a batch of striking images. Especially when they are to be displayed in an area of such enormous comparative privilege, like Hampstead.

Yet Sheehan says her aim in this show is specifically to draw attention to organisations (two of which are listed at the end of this article) run by Moroccan women which, although largely self-funding, are on the front line of change. Movement is reflected in wider society with the proposed alterations to the law by the new monarch Mohammed VI. His plans though, for raising the marriage age from 15 to 18, abolishing polygamy and changing the divorce laws have run into strong opposition from traditional Muslims.

Sheehan, who has been commissioned to cover the Bosnian war for the Independent, the Armenian crisis for the BBC, and exhibited her work with Amnesty in Ireland, Slovenia and London, was struck by the supportive attitude of the women. "Even when they are effectively outcasts - as in the case of single mothers, who are seen as lower than prostitutes - there is a sense that nobody is on their own," she says.

This warmth - and sometimes humour - is apparent in many of the images: from the communal mint tea drinking of the women and children proudly showing their hennaed hands and feet. From the bright blue skies and stunning mountain backdrop of the remote High Atlas village, Tizi, to the portraits of the young Royal Maroc air stewardesses.

If I hadn't had my own experiences of travelling alone in Morocco, then I might have thought "oh no, not another tirade against unfairness". Yet there the sight of a woman who wants to be on her own is both incomprehensible and bizarre: fair game for mugging at knife-point, following, spitting, whistling, hissing and jeering.

It's difficult to be objective about another culture without sounding sanctimonious, but the wonderful freedom of invisibility that London's streets afford, and the freedom to live as one chooses, is something which should not be taken for granted.

Helen Smithson :
Ham and High, Hampstead and Highgate Express March 17. 2000

EUROPE: STILLS FROM A WAR – Croatia will never look the same again.

On top of Barnet Hill in the quaintly-named Old Bull Arts Centre hangs a small but disturbing exhibition of photographs from the battered town of Vukovar, formerly in the federation of Yugoslavia.

They are not action pictures, with soldiers and tanks marauding about the town as we have seen on our television screens. They are of rocket-pocked buildings, photographed in the bright sunshine of a single January day earlier this year.

Artist turned photographer Helen Sheehan took all her pictures from the relative safety of the inside of a car, which was escorted around the Baroque town in Croatia, now under Serb control.

As more than 30 journalists have already been killed in the conflict, many with cameras in hand, Sheehan did well to listen to the advice to stay in the vehicle. But her pictures are no weaker from having been taken from the same seat. At times, she uses the windscreen and the mirror to add a further dimension of surreal mystery.

Irish-born Sheehan says she went to Vukovar because she was appalled “not just at the destruction, but at the viciousness of the destruction”. Her experience of Irish nationalism has influenced her work, she says.

Some of the pictures have banners stretched across the road, as you would find at a village fete, but there aren’t many people celebrating – just damage everywhere. Roof beams hang precariously in the winter sunshine, the leafless trees adding to the eerie atmosphere. It is a scene straight from an early episode of the Avengers, but this is no joke. The banners are celebrating the first anniversary of the city’s fall. Redundant water towers and church steeples loom over roofless houses. A newly-opened import/export office will not be doing any trade for a long time. The prints are like damaged Eugene Atgetswhat. But whereas the famous French photographer recorded the streets of Paris so that artists could paint the city’s beauty, it is doubtful if Sheehan’s pictures will be used as such. The buildings are a mess. Her pictures stun with the futility of war, and the incredible waste. The exhibition’s book of comments – always a tough place for an artist fo look – contains the reaction: very sad, very moving and thought-provoking. What more can art do?

Eamonn McCabe: The Guardian. 14th October 1993