Clots of Memory: Rupture and Continuity in Sonia Balassanian’s Installation

Dedicated to Kasra Heidarizadeh

In Wrapped memories in plastic, Sonia Balassanian explores the representation of memory in a state of suspension and frigidity. The work’s structure relies on two visual poles: a wall covered with transparent plastic bags, each containing objects, images, and fragments of texts or magazines; and, in the foreground, an overturned chair beside a cluster of black books scattered across the wooden floor. This duality between the wall-as-archive and the floor-as-ruin generates the work’s fundamental tension—a tension between the desire to preserve and the necessity to forget.

In this piece, plastic functions simultaneously as a protective and restrictive medium: a material that prevents decay and corruption, yet also suffocates and obstructs touch. From this perspective, memory in Balassanian’s world is not a living, fluid phenomenon but a sealed and archived body—a corpus of recollections and signs that in the very moment of preservation becomes devoid of life. Each bag serves as a capsule for the remains of experience, a sign of a past that can no longer be fully narrated: fragments of rope, feathers, printed matter, and photographs that seem to emerge from a lost event or a buried catastrophe. These dispersed elements form a fractured, discontinuous language that hovers between archive and nightmare—a language especially familiar to the migrant and exilic subject.

Within the composition, the overturned chair holds a central role. In Western visual tradition, the chair often signifies the seat of thought or the presence of a human subject. Here, it has become a symbol of absence and instability. Its inversion acts as a metaphor for the collapse of the subject in confrontation with history—a subject that has lost its place and remains suspended among inanimate objects and ownerless memories. Alongside it, the black books resemble silent tombs of knowledge, underscoring the failure of historical narration and the incapacity of language to articulate pain and exile. Thus Balassanian’s installation becomes a kind of negative memorial—a monument to what has been lost, forgotten, or never granted the chance to be spoken.

Wrapped memories in plastic can be read as an outgrowth of the artist’s lived experience—an existence stretched between two cultural geographies. Born into Iran’s Armenian community and living in the United States since the 1970s, Balassanian addresses in her work the question of migrant identity and memory: a memory that is fragmented, asynchronous, and polyphonic rather than unified or linear. In this installation, too, memory is rendered through material objects and fragile archives—objects whose survival depends on being sealed within a layer of plastic, just as memory itself endures only through its frigidity and through re-presentation in art.

Despite its formal simplicity, Balassanian’s work poses a fundamental question: does archiving truly preserve and recall, or is it merely another form of erasure and isolation? The artist’s implicit response lies in the poetic core of her work: in a world perpetually threatened by oblivion, the act of keeping—even when futile and contradictory—becomes a gesture of resistance: resistance against erasure, against silence, and against the disappearance of memory.