From the iWitness intallation
GLENDALE—The highly anticipated and reimagined Downtown Central Library in Glendale has announced the reopening of its doors with a ReflectSpace: a new exhibition space designed to explore and reflect on major human atrocities, genocides and civil rights violations. Immersive in conception, ReflectSpace is a hybrid gallery space that is both experiential and informative, employing art, technology and interactive media to reflect on the past and present of Glendale’s communal fabric and interrogate current-day global human rights issues.
The inaugural exhibit, called Landscape of Memory: Witnesses and Remnants of the Armenian Genocide, unfolds in two distinct but interconnected parts and reflects on the Armenian Genocide through the cross-disciplinary work of witnesses, survivors, and artists, across four generations.
In the newly constructed ReflectSpace, Witnesses & Remnants examines the relationship of witnessing, survivor testimony and its generational aftermath. Leslie A. Davis, the US Consul in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, risked his life in saving Armenians and taking photographs of the Genocide. Davis’ critical work as a photographer and documentarian are presented and contextualized. Davis is connected to contemporary photographers via the portrait and testimony of Hayastan Terzian: one of the young girls he saved. Coming nearly a century after Davis, New York-based artist Aram Jibilian’s “Gorky and the Glass Houseâ€
