Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian

Born to a Syrian mother and an Armenian father who fled the Lebanon war to exile in Canada, Mirna Abiad-Boyadjian has long been interested in the (post)memory of war in Lebanese contemporary art and the Lebanese diaspora through the adoption of an auto-ethnographic perspective.^[1] As a researcher and author, she cultivates a “mode of being with and for the other”^[2] and leans into aesthetic methods by which it is possible to appropriate vulnerability through the traumas experienced in order to “transform silence into words and acts.”^[3] Quoting the voices of women visual artists, filmmakers, and authors, her writing becomes the basis for research that took the form of an installation at Est-Nord-Est. On one wall of the studio were arranged texts and images from films directed by women, drawn from, among others, the National Film Board’s online archives. On the other side of the room, quotations by the Arab-Lebanese poet and artist Etel Adnan were mixed with Abiad-Boyadjian’s own handwritten poetic notes.^[4] On tables, she spread out various elements of her project Au cœur d’un autre silence, drawn from a testimonial by her mother that appeared in the publication of the Association de la Défense des Droits Sociaux in 1987. Finally, she continued her work on “Horizon Beyrouth-Montréal” for an issue of Le Merle, Cahiers sur les mots et les gestes that she co-edited with François Lemieux, to be published in 2025. And so, sketched out before our eyes was a maze of rich and complex connections, between Abiad-Boyadjian’s voice and those of women from various other places with whom she identifies outside of a centred kinship. Out of these references and echoes grew extremely porous writing in tight relation to others and thought of as a political engagement. Given the trans-generational traumas inherited from her family history and as a woman, Abiad-Boyadjian therefore engages in sensitive research and writing in which “care of the self”^[5] – that is, the private story – comes into close relation with the world. Through the singular connection that she maintains with those who inspire her, she tries to transform the experience of trauma into a vital spark of collective hope. ^[1] A term she invented. ^[2] M. Abiad-Boyadjian, “Le soin des devenirs: Sisters in Motion feat. d’bi.young anitafrika / Care for Becoming: Sisters in Motion feat. d’bi.young anitafrika,” Esse arts + opinions, no. 106 (2022): 48–53. ^[3] Ibid. ^[4] From research for writing an article for Spirale. ^[5] Expression borrowed from the title of Michel Foucault’s book  Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) (our translation).