Medium: video performance
Duration: 3 min., 24 sec.
Date: 2002

Kilikia is a video performance built around three interconnected elements: the Armenian song Kilikia, the body, and the act of drawing. The song, which has become a symbol of memory, exile, and longing for a lost homeland, forms the emotional foundation of the work. As it plays, a young woman gradually draws on her body ornamental grape vines adapted from medieval Armenian manuscripts and architectural carvings.

The performer does not illustrate the song's narrative or reenact its history. Instead, the work explores how the emotional weight of a collective past can be inherited by those who did not experience it directly. The melancholy carried by the song belongs to previous generations, yet it continues to shape the present through cultural memory. As the ornament slowly spreads across her skin, the body becomes the place where an inherited history is received, accepted, and embodied.

The vine, a recurring motif in Armenian visual culture, symbolizes continuity, renewal, and the endurance of cultural memory. Removed from stone carvings and illuminated manuscripts and transferred onto the body, it transforms the skin into a temporary manuscript. Unlike monuments or historical artifacts, these marks exist only for the duration of the performance, suggesting that cultural memory survives not through permanence but through repeated acts of transmission.

Although rooted in Armenian history and visual culture, Kilikia reflects on a broader human experience: the ways in which inherited memories shape personal identity. Histories of displacement, loss, resilience, and belonging are carried across generations through songs, rituals, symbols, and gestures. The work proposes that identity is never formed in isolation but is continuously negotiated through the memories we inherit, the histories we accept, and the cultural traces we choose to carry forward.