Professor Heghnar Watenpaugh will present a public lecture at the National Institute of Oriental Languages ​​and Civilizations (INALCO) on Mar. 27 in Paris. Her talk on Survivor Objects and Captive Sites: Art and Cultural Heritage in Genocide will be the inaugural presentation for the International Master’s Program in Armenian Studies (IMAS) for which Watenpaugh is the 2025 IMAS Visiting Chair of Excellence. 

In her lecture, Watenpaugh aks what happened to the cultural heritage of the communities destroyed during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire? Armenian cultural sites, particularly religious sites, were destroyed, repurposed, appropriated, sold, or transferred. Most of them were severed from their connection to the surviving Armenian communities.

Objects – particularly sacred ones – were also transferred, looted, or moved. Some eventually found their way into museums in Europe or North America, where they are now valued for their aesthetic qualities.

Watenpaugh proposes to reflect on the near-simultaneity of these two processes – destruction and transformation into a work of art – and to examine their multiple implications, as well as what this means for art history and for the museum institution in the 21st century, in the context of the Armenian Genocide.