The Armenian Studies Program hosted diasporic artist Ara Oshagan and his recently published photographic book displaced [հատում] in a presentation on Friday, February 13, 2026. The lecture focused on “memory, multigenerational diaspora, and the ambiguities of return.” Through images and text created in collaboration with writer Krikor Beledian, Oshagan presented Beirut, specifically the Armenian district of Bourj Hammoud, not simply as a location, but as a place of inherited trauma, and cultural persistence.

Published by Kehrer Verlag, displaced is the third installment in a trilogy Oshagan has been working on since the late 1990s, following projects set in Los Angeles and Artsakh/Armenia. Beirut completes this arc. Yet as Oshagan explained, the return is not to a singular homeland, but to what he called a “diasporic return.” Born in Beirut to par-ents and grandparents shaped by the Armenian Genocide and displacement, Oshagan later returned to Lebanon during the Civil War. “Every generation seems to experience displacement.” His grandfather, the writer Hagop Oshagan, moved from Constantinople to Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Jerusalem, and ultimately Beirut, “a man from everywhere,” shaped by constant linguistic and cultural transition.

This history of constant movement is the foundation of displacement. Rather than arriving in Beirut with a fixed plan, Oshagan described mapping an area, primarily Bourj Hammoud, and simply living within it. “I don’t go with a specific idea of what I want to photograph,” he explained. “It’s a kind of random movement… a friction between the world and myself.”

Sometimes he would speak with someone for an hour and take no photographs and other times, images were all he did. After six trips between 2014 and 2018, he returned home and began what he calls the “weeding” process, pinning photographs to his studio wall and letting them “tell him” the direction of the book.

The resulting images are black and white, layered, and often dark. When asked why he avoids color, Oshagan rejected nostalgia as the reason. “Black and white is more perceptual for me,” he said. “It’s about form and composition.” Color would pull the viewer emotionally toward specific elements – monochrome emphasizes struc-ture. The darkness that shaped many of the photographs was not intentional, he noted, but emerged organically. Only later did he understand it as reflective of Beirut’s political instability, economic collapse, generational trauma, and the endangered status of Western Armenian. “The photographs kind of told me,” he said, suggesting that the mood surfaced subconsciously.

One of the most interesting images, featured as the book’s cover, shows a man standing against a wall in Bourj Hammoud, layered with Arabic and French signage, Armenian and Syrian presences, and traces of colonial history.

Oshagan described these as images of “diasporic presence,” ambiguous with multiple layers, never singular. His late father once described diaspora as “centrifugal and centripetal at the same time, but intensely intimate.” That tension brings life to work.

Throughout the lecture, Oshagan read from a deeply personal essay included in the book. He described standing in the stone-built mountain home of his childhood: “Among the tiles I see myself, past and present intertwined.” He recalled running through forests, playing near the American University of Beirut, and later fleeing gunfire during the Civil War. Returning decades later, he asks, “What possible narrative can peer down a chasm of time?” The city feels both unchanged and forever transformed, a place where joy and violence coexist. “I see men, women, children… ghosts familiar and foreign,” he read. “A resilient community breathing an undying past.”

Beledian’s accompanying text shows this layered vision. Written originally in Western Armenian and translated into English, his work describes walking into Bourj Hammoud as a child, crossing a symbolic bridge into what he calls a “fortress town.” “Times are superimposed on each other,” writes Beledian. “…Unsteady, murky, tangled layers.” Oshagan noted how astonishing it was that their works, created independently, seemed to speak in parallel rhythms.

The photographs range widely: families in cramped apartments, Easter processions inside Armenian churches, a butcher named Mr. Sako, children playing war in the streets, a former fedayee who defended Bourj Hammoud during the Civil War, graffiti covered walls, and the district cemetery with its meticulous burial records.

In one image, children play with rifles, real or not, Oshagan could not say, mimicking the war they have grown up witnessing.

In another, an Easter lamb sacrifice unfolds in stark chiaroscuro. “Let your eyes wander,” he encouraged people in attendance. “Every time I look, I see something new.”

He also addressed representation directly. While many outsiders focus on the chaotic electrical wires that dominate Beirut’s skyline, Oshagan intentionally avoided reproducing cliche imagery. “It’s important to look inward,” he explained. “Not just to show the world something about us, but to show something to ourselves.” His goal was to offer Bourj Hammoud residents images that allow them to see themselves differently.

The lecture concluded with excerpts from a three-channel film that accompanies the book. Sound, image, and language intertwine, immersing viewers in what Oshagan described as “three zones moving at once.” The overlapping rhythms echo the layered structure of both the photographs and Beledian’s prose.

In its final image, a father and child stand together beneath a small plaque reading, “Let your kindness be shown to everyone.”

For Oshagan, this generational pairing gestures toward possibility. Even within a “very dark place,” he suggested, there remains imagination, an “unimagined future.”

Ultimately, displaced is not simply about Beirut. It is about the diaspora itself, through shadow and light, Oshagan wants viewers to sit within that ambiguity, and to see in it both history and endurance.