Tsovinar Kuiumchian
DPhil Student
St Peter's College
Research: My doctoral research examines contemporary Armenian art as a material and embodied mode of engaging with the enduring legacies and contemporary forms of genocide, displacement and dispossession across the Armenian transnation. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in Armenia, present-day Turkey, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the United States, the project explores how artistic practices—including installation, sculpture, performance, drawing, painting, textiles, sound, photography and video—shape relationships between artists, audiences and the wider social world. Bringing the anthropology of art into dialogue with scholarship on violence, trauma and social suffering, it investigates how artistic production contributes to processes of repair by staging sensory and affective encounters and fostering forms of political life under conditions of rupture.
Research interests: the anthropology of art; art worlds; visual and material culture; embodiment; multimodality; violence and repair; the anthropology of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora.
Previous education:
MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology (University of Oxford)
MSc in Security Studies (UCL)
BA in European Social and Political Studies (UCL)