Larissa Araz: The Lost Reference List

How can we remember things that were forced on us to forget?

Eleni İliadis (1895–1975), İvi Stangali (1922–1999), and Eleonora Arhelaou (1937–2021) are three Rum women artists from Turkey, who lived between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic. These women were either forced to exile or left İstanbul, Turkey to Athens, Greece. Soon enough their exile becomes a limbo and their stories have left to their oblivion. Due to Turkey’s identity politics towards non-muslim minorities (Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians) and patriarchal approach to art, the names of these women have been left to erasure in Turkey’s art history canon.

From a revisionist and a feminist perspective, the project is in search of these erasures of history. The title of the work stems from an effort to create an abstract reference list of these erasures. As the archives in Turkey are confronted with many problems, I would like to search for the presence of these three artists in Athens.