Ara Oshagan
Artist, Author, Curator, and Community Activist
"My work as an artist and curator is very personal: It is sourced from my own history of displacement and transnational Armenian-American-Lebanese identity. Personal and communal narratives of genocide, war, and multigenerational catastrophe that give rise to new identities and states are my core themes, and my work attempts to untangle these hybrid identities and generate narratives that resist erasure in general, and the erasure of my own history in particular."
Biography
Oshagan’s photographic and installation work revolves around the intersecting themes of identity, community, and displacement. His first book, Father Land, about real and imagined identity, was published by powerHouse books in 2010. Mirror was self-published in 2016; it uses augmented reality to address creative spaces in diaspora. His third book, dis/placed, about hybrid identity and the ambiguities of return, will be published in 2020.
Oshagan’s installation work includes (re)population, set in a bombed-out building in Armenia, and iwitness at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles in 2015 and Glendale in 2017. He has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Downey Museum of Art; Seongbuk City Art Gallery in Seoul, South Korea; the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts; powerHouse Arena in New York City; and Tufenkian Fine Art in L.A. Oshagan’s work has been reviewed and featured in PDN, Mother Jones, The Times Literary Supplement, L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly, Zeke, and on NPR's Morning Edition, and is in the permanent collection of the Southeast Museum of Photography, the Downey Museum of Art, the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, and the MOMA in Armenia.
In 2016, Oshagan was selected as a “Cultural Trailblazer” by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and in 2015, along with his collaborators, was selected as one of “100 Leading Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, D.C.