Shushi’s Occupied Museums

Hyperallergic Sunday Edition: “Artsakh: Cultural Heritage Under Threat”
Edited by Hrag Vartanian
February 2021

This essay for Hyperallergic‘s Sunday Edition addresses the status of arts institutions in Occupied Shushi, Artsakh’s cultural capital and home to six of its museums. After the seizure of ancestral lands by the state of Azerbaijan, Indigenous Armenian heritage in occupied Artsakh’s museums faces the threat of erasure and cultural cleansing:

From the essay:

“If decolonizing the museum requires reckoning with settler colonial histories, how do we approach decolonization in a state where history itself is a principal target of erasure?”