Image, displacement, prosthesis: reflections on making visual archives of the Armenian genocide

In the face of the persistent denial of the Armenian genocide, this paper aims to discuss the way in which images can function as a prosthesis for memory. Because there are few images of this violent history and because those that do exist are not circulated in the public visual sphere, it is of crucial importance to re-create them, not as evidentiary documents but as fictional images that respond to what the deniers of the genocide consider to be a "fictional event". By analysing the work of Atom Egoyan and Gariné Torossian, two Canadian visual artists of Armenian origin, this paper reflects upon the "aesthetics of displacement" that characterizes both filmmakers' visual enterprise as an obsessive, repetitive yet lacunary necessity.