Veronika Babayan is an artist, writer and educator who is interested in pedagogies that affect the perpetual production of a national identity. Babayan works with collective memories that offer alternative accounts to those of mainstream histories. By imitating traditional women’s practices, she emphasizes the role of feminism in undermining the authority of patriotic memory. Her practice looks for ways in which antagonistic histories can interact with each other transnationally. In doing so, she borrows syncretic cultural elements, signs and symbols to create new, in between spaces for interterritorial belonging.
SOUR COUNTERFEITS sets up a forgery lab, which consists of several elements and shows the production of fruit leather. This slow method of sun-drying fruit has been practiced predominantly by women in the Caucasus and Middle East. The work imitates the tradition of fruit leather as an inherited routine of a maternal practice. The recipe takes the form of a mnemonic device, which has the ability to transmit both trans-generationally and transnationally. Here, it is regarded as a vessel through which oral testimonies of uprooted experiences can be transmitted beyond territory, language and nationhood.