About Us
Marianna Hovhannisyan
Project Coordinator
Marianna Hovhannisyan is a research-based curator and a Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Visual Arts Dept., UC San Diego. She works at the intersection of visual culture and contemporary art with the focus on the critical museum and archival studies that converge at the politics of metadata, postcolonial theories, and new historiographies. Hovhannisyan has explored archives as conflicted sites in nation-state building narratives by uncovering ‘unattended’ objects and scripting ontological and geopolitical gaps. Her exhibitions align the curatorial work with the research. Particularly, she has developed the ongoing research that both registers and activates absences with the Armenian subject—national, post-/Soviet, Eastern/Western, “native minority,” refugee, or diasporic. Such concerns are reflected in her 2016 curatorial exhibition, Empty Fields (exhibition design: artist Fareed Armaly), commissioned by SALT Cultural Center, Istanbul.
Recent research grants/awards and curatorial fellowships include: the UC San Diego Institute of Arts and Humanities; the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, Getty Consortium Seminar, the first EU-funded Armenia-Turkey Fellowship by Hrant Dink Foundation, Kadist Art Foundation, and Center for Experimental Museology, V-A-C Foundation; Recent talks—UCLA GSEIS seminars; Dept. of Art, Design and Visual Studies, Boise State University.