Aurora Mardiganian: Survivor, Witness, Activist

Aurora Mardiganian, a witness and survivor of the Armenian Genocide, has become a figure of popular lore and projection over the years. Here, Dr. Baronian offers a portrait of Aurora as a pioneer and activist, a young woman who having survived the unimaginable violence of the Genocide wrote a memoir to tell her story and the story of her people, then went on to play her own role in a 1919 Hollywood production that became the first ever film to depict genocide. Baronian argues that Aurora’s mission is far from being closed and, moreover, that it compels us to think about the ways in which we can continue to tell the stories of survivors and to bear witness to atrocity.

Originally published March 2023.

About the speaker

Marie-Aude Baronian

Marie-Aude Baronian is an Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Film at the University of Amsterdam. She has written extensively on the relationship between images, archive, and testimony, on Armenian diasporic artistic practices, on memory, media and visual arts, on ethics and aesthetics, and on fashion and textiles. Her most recent monographic book is Screening Memory: The Prosthetic Images of Atom Egoyan (Belgian Royal Academy, 2017).

Marie-Aude Baronian