It's easy to underestimate a backyard barbeque. A table gets dragged out into the sun, someone watches the grill, children run through the legs of the adults, and the afternoon is allowed to simply be long, and belong to everyone there.
The whole day is built from living simplicities: a paper plate in your hand, passing things back and forth to one another, a familiar voice across the yard, the same song coming out of someone's speaker that has played at every one of these afternoons before...
It's a circle.
The two large round gold discs are, to my eye, reminiscent of paper plates, though their faces say 'clock'. They are no longer the paper plates of a family barbecue in summer, which wouldn't have been the case in Armenia in April 1915. Now the paper plates are divvied out from the tents set up to feed displaced Armenians. The families' gathering has changed shape.
Community is a line now, not a circle.
No longer facing each other across the table, they face the back of the head in front of them, waiting for a paper plate to reach them, and the ease of the circle is replaced by the order of the queue. That line is in the painting, too. It's the line of shocked people, the line cook's service with a smile, and the line of the hours all running in the same direction... and clocks sit on them with no helping hands, giving blank stares.
But the red - the blood-bound rites and rituals - is still there. It runs down the left side in streaks, wet yet never diluted. Everything around it has been dulled by time to old gold, like a table left out in the sun in your mind for thirty summers. Still, the red exists and persists, brightly untouched. The grief of life within the lives; the loss of normality and daily living, and in the familiar faces a refugee can never forget.
The bass is cut off, much like the refugees gave up their base, their home removed. Nothing in the frame stands on anything. Only now a dark smeared edge at the bottom where the floor used to be.
The flag, too, has been disseminated. The title promises a banner, and the painting holds the red and the orange but is missing its blue, and what hangs here has had its meaning changed. A shade of its people eliminated down to a duopoly, shaken from its tricolour, left to be read in two.
Down the left of the canvas, smaller discs are stacked like a pile of paper plates waiting at the end of a long table. Five of them, stacked in red like the 5Rhythms, and the grief keeps time through them all.
The rhythms of the day go on, and that could be the cruelty of it.
In the aftermath of such shock, the same rituals, the meals and sharing stories and bonding should be neutral. It should be the most unremarkable thing a household does. But for displaced people, these somehow quickly transmogrify into forms of protest, when they never tried to be. If your existence is an affront, and deemed as warfare, any who remain become a statement of the failure of the Armenian genocide. And so, the simple act of eating off paper plates or keeping a schedule becomes a radical act of being human.
For Armenians it is remembered as 24 April 1915, the traumatic scar that spliced human beings into Humanitarian trage
Tankian keeps that split in plain sight. A scar-like miasma of genocide tears through the fabric of time. It runs as a raw red band down one side, bleeds out in streaks and spatters across the clocks. He leaves the quieter gold field on the other side untouched, so the hours stand either side of the wound. No time can be taken off them, because grief is timeless.
If you've ever travelled to the Other European countries, it first strikes you as an old wall that stands in a now bustling metro, riddled with the scars of the brutality. That is what this canvas is; old plaster warmed by the sun. Life walks past, and the wall keeps standing, holding the record for anyone who stops to look.
Paper plates, drumming and clocks are round in shape and in memory they merge into time in memoriam.
Serj Tankian has been a New Zealand citizen since 2007. Grieving Banner, painted in 2013, has been displayed here in New Zealand at Boyd-Dunlop Gallery in Napier. In a country that has not changed its position and still does not say the word. Genocide. Successive governments have spoken of a significant loss of life, and called the rest a matter for reconciliation.
A neutral reality is what happens when something hasn't yet been shifted into gear. The engine is running, the years are passing, and nothing moves. The distasteful part is the government that leaves the Question! idling. Former Green MP Gareth Hughes tried to bring a recognition motion to Parliament, and it was rejected. Armenians like Tankian, carry their grandparents' memoirs, whole in its message of visceral violence, and story he has delivered with a red seal stamped for New Zealand. Tankian's work here – just like a person needing to eat - doesn't wait for permission to say what Parliament has not.
The only thing missing from that picture is the full circle of New Zealand's acknowledgement, and its support.