The following announcement was offered by Project Save:
Project Save Photographic Archive, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit devoted to preserving the worldwide Armenian expertise via pictures, introduced at this time its lineup of fall programming, together with its first main exhibition within the group’s gallery and archive area, and two occasions in its well-liked “Conversations on Photography” sequence.
French-Armenian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Astrig Agopian’s multimedia exhibition Like There’s No Tomorrow will open at Project Save on Nov. 13, 2025 and run via Jan. 17, 2026. The exhibit focuses on the Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh, a area Armenians have inhabited for millennia and whose cultural heritage has endured centuries of upheaval. Agopian’s exhibition digs deeply into questions of cultural heritage, id in diaspora, and wartime displacement. The exhibit is in partnership with ART WORKS Projects, a Chicago- and Hague-based visible arts non-profit.
Like There’s No Tomorrow incorporates images and video that doc the lives of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh as an Azerbaijan-led battle broke out in September 2020 and escalated in 2023 into mass displacement, broadly described by human rights organizations as ethnic cleaning. Agopian’s travels to the world garnered interview footage and intensive photographic documentation of battle and its results, following people and households as they navigated violence, loss and displacement. The venture combines highly effective pictures, oral histories, and multimedia property right into a residing archive that additionally serves instructional and advocacy functions.
“Agopian invites us to consider how people live in and endure the unimaginable: war, hatred, and revisionist history, and what they cling to or carry when forced to flee,” stated Arto Vaun, Executive Director of Project Save. “Her work reflects Project Save’s mission to preserve and share the stories and cultural materials that define the global Armenian experience.”
To deepen the historic narrative, Vaun says the exhibition will embrace images from Project Save’s personal collections, offered alongside Agopian’s modern work. These archival photographs doc Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, amplifying the continuum of Armenian presence and resilience within the area.
Like There’s No Tomorrow is supported via ART WORKS Projects’ Emerging Lens Fellowship. Partially funded via the National Endowment for the Arts, Emerging Lens gives unrestricted stipends, skilled mentorship, editorial and manufacturing assist to rising visible storytellers throughout the globe working to doc human rights points via lived experiences. More particulars on the Fellowship are here.
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“Conversations On Photography” sequence spotlights acclaimed native artists
Project Save’s mission-expansive work contains conversations with outstanding voices in pictures and the visible arts whose work highlights the significance of documentation and archiving, and using visible storytelling within the preservation of cultural heritage. Two “Conversations On Photography” occasions are deliberate this fall:
- Thu, Oct thirtieth, @ 7pm – Conversation with Toni Pepe. As Chair of Photography and Associate Professor of Art at Boston University, Toni Pepe creates prints and three-dimensional assemblages from discarded newspaper photographs, household snapshots and out of date photographic gear. Using these parts, Pepe investigates how pictures shapes understandings of time, area and self. In dialog with Arto Vaun, Pepe presents examples from her work Can I Hold You?, exploring the press images and newspaper clippings discovered within the Boston Public Library’s Women and Gender Issues Collection. These images, lengthy hidden inside a bigger Library archive, and the gathering’s origins stay unknown. Pepe says working within the archive as an artist “allows me to navigate it not just as a repository of history, but as an unstable, active space of meaning. By emphasizing the photograph as both image and artifact, I hope to prompt viewers to reconsider how we witness, record and remember.”
- Thu, Nov. sixth @ 7pm – Conversation with Claire Beckett. The Boston-based photographer’s large-scale portraits provide views right into a post-9/11 America and the affect of the U.S. on world affairs. In dialog with Boston Public Library Lead Curator & Manager of the Arts Kristin Parker, Beckett will present and talk about images from her physique of labor that provide a crucial lens on American id and the affect of worldwide battle. Recent initiatives embrace Simulating Iraq, a shocking take a look at cultural appropriation inside American navy coaching, together with maneuvers throughout which troops enact coaching practices upon different troops wearing conventional costume of Middle Eastern residents. The “cosplay” parts of the maneuvers have a major affect on American troopers who’re themselves Middle Eastern, Muslim, or observe Islam. Of her work, Beckett says, “Photography is my language for thinking and speaking. I lean into picture-making’s visual and psychological aspects to draw viewers in, encouraging them to think about the issues driving the work.”
“All three of these photographers are telling a larger story about how culture is perceived, collected, and preserved,” Vaun says. “Their work reflects Project Save’s role as a living archive. Each one brings photographs and stories to life; they preserve and illuminate culture and history through their lenses.”
A Legacy of Preservation
Founded in 1975 by Ruth Thomasian, Project Save started as a grassroots effort to doc the tales of aged Armenian immigrants via images. Over 5 many years, the group amassed greater than 100,000 unique photographs from Armenian households and communities world wide, depicting each day life, world occasions, non secular ceremonies, and visits with political leaders, artists, writers and freedom fighters. Vaun turned Project Save’s Executive Director in 2021 and led the acquisition of Project Save’s first public house, full with workplaces, climate-controlled storage, and gallery area.