Vahe Oshagan: Between Acts (2016)

When the writer Vahé Oshagan died in 2000, the New York Times described him as "the most important poet of his generation." As a poet and fiction writer, Oshagan wrote in Western Armenian, liberating the language from some of its constraints, opening it to larger existential questions but also to the energy of the Armenian vernacular. He also sought to ally his medium with the other arts, painting, music, and in his last prose work, photography. He collaborated with the Paris-based painter Archak, whose work was included in almost all of Oshagan's works; and with the electronic music composer Ohannes Salibian who re-fashioned two of his poems into sound-text creations. Vahé Oshagan: A Portrait is in the spirit of Oshagan's own esthetic beliefs. Seventeen years after his death, Oshagan continues to exert influence on the cultural life of the Armenian diaspora, as well as the Republic of Armenia as a new generation of Armenians turns to literary texts that speak to the themes of displacement, homeland-diaspora relations, and to literary creation in general.