About me

Biography

The artist is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants to Argentina, since 1988 she lives in Berlin.

 

Her artistic work deal with issues related to the burden of national identity, the role of minorities in the society and the potential of an space "in between". Der-Meguerditchian is interested in the impact of migration in the urban texture and its consequences. Reconstruction of the past and the building of archives are a red thread in her artistic research. Her work is multidisciplinary and uses different medias. Since 2010 she is artistic director of Houshamadyan (www.houshamadyan.org), a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life.  In 2014/15 she was awarded with a fellowship at the Kulturakademie Tarabya, a residency program of the German Foreign Ministry and the Goethe Institute in Istanbul. Further she participated in "Armenity", the Pavilion awarded with the Golden Lion at the 56. Venice Biennial for the best national participation. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions around the world, including, among others, Germany, Argentina, USA and Turkey. Her last initiated and coordinated collective project "Grandchildren, new geographies of belonging" (DEPO Cultural Center- Istanbul) was supported by the Goethe Institut and the German Foreign Ministry in 2015. In 2018 she participated at Hello World. Revising a Collection, a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Since 2014 she works with „Women mobilizing memory“ a group of artists, writers, theater practitioners, museologists, legal scholars, social activists, and scholars of memory and memorialization, who focuse on the political stakes and consequences of witnessing and testimony as responses to socially imposed vulnerability and historical trauma. It probes how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social repair. In 2020, her film "The Wishing Tree" was awarded with a Special Mention at the Sharjah Film Platform. Her first personal catalog with VFMK (Verlag für Moderne Kunst) has been published in January 2021.

 

She was awarded the Falkenrot Prize 2021/2. In 2022, she was awarded a work grant from the Berlin Senate and the "In view" grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lissabon/Portugal). In 2023 she participated at the exhibition "Mediterráneo, un mar redondo", at the ARCO Art Fair, Madrid, "Realities left vacant", N.B.K. (Neuer Berliner Kunstverein) , Berlin, “MOVED, what my bones know”, Galerie Nord, Berlin and the show “Home/Hope '' at the 3rd edition of the Larnaca biennale in Cyprus. Further she was presented at the Frieze London Art fair by the Kalfayan Galleries, which have represented her since 2018.  Her last experimental short film Thresholds has been invited to several film festivals worldwide and awarded at the Toronto Woman film festival and the New York Independent Cinema Awards.

 

 

 

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