Atom Egoyan was born to Armenian parents in Egypt and raised in Canada. As such, he has some personal investment in keeping alive the memory of the Armenian Genocide.
The Academy Award-nominated director joined forces with Turkish artist Kutug Ataman to create Arouras and Testimony, a pair of video works memorializing the Genocide, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed or forcibly relocated by the rulers of the dying Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917.
“It’s sort of a dialogue on a very loaded subject,” Egoyan said this week. The exhibit asks the question, he says, of how the testimony of survivors can be used to “keep retelling the story.”
“If we don’t make an effort to remember this issue, it might go away,” he said.
Auroras/Testimony will be on display at the Artcore Gallery in the Distillery District through June 10, daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
