Open Session #22: Hosted by Garine Boghossian

Urbanist and researcher Garine Boghossian presents An Armenian Atlas / Աշխարհացոյց, an ongoing counter-mapping project that centers houshamadyans, memory books produced by Armenian Genocide survivors across diasporic centers, from Aleppo to Los Angeles. Houshamadyans often include mental maps drawn from memory and lived spatial knowledge of the homelands from which Armenians and other minoritized communities were ethnically cleansed. Boghossian, herself a third-generation survivor, overlays these mental maps onto contemporary satellite imagery, alongside personal and archival photography. Through this work, she documents Indigenous dispossession, challenges the systematic erasure central to ongoing state-led genocide denial, and recovers lost spatial histories that gesture toward reparative futures. Following the presentation, Boghossian will be joined in conversation by Lara Fresko Madra, Assistant Professor and Luma Fellow at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies.

Garine Boghossian is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in New York. She is the founder of An Armenian Atlas / Աշխարհացոյց, an ongoing research and mapping initiative exploring Western Armenian spatial histories and cartographies. She is a Senior Urban Designer at ORG New York, where she has led large-scale urban and regional planning projects internationally. Boghossian is a Visiting Critic at Cornell University and has taught architecture and urban design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and the Boston Architectural College. She holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American University of Beirut. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs and publications such as Line Files, Issue-A (LINE Biennial, 2025), Expansions (La Biennale di Venezia, 2021), Broken Nature (The XXII Triennale di Milano, 2019), The Funambulist, and Wasafiri.

Lara Fresko Madra is Assistant Professor and Luma Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College where she teaches the core curriculum and electives on global contemporary art and political imagination in the history of art. Her research investigates artistic and curatorial practices that offer alternative modes of recalling and engaging the past, particularly as a challenge to the violence of state sanctioned official historiography. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from Cornell University and her research has been supported by the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs, collected volumes, as well as publications like Afterall, Diacritics Blog, e-flux Criticism, Journal of Visual Culture, and LARB.