Reparations of the Heart: Toward a SWANA Futurity by Kristin Anahit Cass

About the author: Kristin Anahit Cass is an artist working in photography, video, writing, sculpture and other media. Cass’s work imagines the future, touches the past, and envisions a better world. As Lori Waxman noted in New City, her “portraits, of both people and places, are composed with a tender straightforwardness that befits each particular subject. Instead of the aestheticized ruins of disaster porn, moments of human resilience shine through alongside the trauma.” In addition to her arts education, Cass has worked with women and minority owned businesses, artists, and nonprofits in her career as a lawyer. She is one of the founders of the LGBTQ platform Entanik (Family) where she is active in supporting creatives in the global community. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Reparations of the Heart at the Stamelos Gallery Center at the University of Michigan, Witness: The Artist's Response at Elephant Room Gallery in Chicago, Chicago Neighborhoods at the Hairpin Gallery in Chicago and SLAYSIAN 2.0 at Co-Prosperity in Chicago. Her Borderlands Under Fire project was a finalist for the 2018 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Cass is a graduate of the University of Chicago. You can find her work at kristincass.com, on Instagram at KristinAnahitCassProjects, on Facebook at Kristin Cass Photography, and on LinkedIn at Anahit Cass

About the book: What does the world look like from a SWANA (South West Asian and North African) futurist perspective? Can we envision a future of mutual support, and a flowering of our diverse and shared SWANA cultures, even in the shadow of turmoil caused by the lingering effects of imperialism on countries from Armenia to Afghanistan to Palestine to Syria? Can we preserve a connection to our ancestors while encouraging the evolution of our societies? This sweeping project imagines the future and envisions creating it, encompassing land back, reparations, ethnic and cultural diversity, ancestral practices, and our shared SWANA culture. In short, SWANA futurism.

"In Reparations for the Heart and in the person of the remarkable artist Anahit Cass, we find a new and powerful artistic voice, one that speaks to today's most pressing issues, including the ongoing war being waged globally against First Peoples by colonizing powers. Cass and her work implicitly understand that this colonization attacks both the person and the land they live on. Using bright colorful family portraits and celebrities from the SWANA region such as the incandescent Lebanese singer Fairuz, she reappropriates the past in order to shape the future. In her clever photographic transformations of both herself and others, Cass positions herself as an heir to the wonderfully clever and disruptive Cindy Sherman, while developing an easily recognizable visual lexicon that is all her own. The artist also positions herself at the vanguard of Armenofuturism, the forward-thinking heiress to the work of Kara-Darvish, Abov, and their colleagues, who at the turn of the twentieth century, sought to fashion a fantastic and more harmonious future for mankind." —Christopher Atamian, Writer, Director, Gallerist, and Curator, Atamian Hovsepian Curatorial Practice

"Reparations of the Heart: Toward a SWANA Futurity is a photo album that hosts love, from a photo studio born of diaspora. Kristin Anahit Cass has assembled a photographic process where care directs the pace of the camera’s shutter. In Anahit’s studio: subjects are loved ones whose affection for each other determines their poses; props are photographs carried between the grips of our ancestors; backdrops are lands we steward in our dreams; and apertures are clocks for queer time. The communal imagination that brings life to Anahit's photography is emblematic of the conditions that constitute an already present SWANA futurity." —Katie Giritlian, Small Press Publisher, Paper Cameras Press

"Reparations of the Heart makes visible the power of transmuting ancestral memory into rich, euphoric, and interconnected life. Kristin Anahit Cass’ images are transportative, taking us to the internal realms where our ancestors, current realities, and possible futures mingle outside of time. This volume stands as testament to a movement of SWANA queers, visioning futures nuanced with the care of holding the past close to the heart." —Levon Kafafian, Detroit-based Weaver and Storyteller

"Kristin Cass is part of a new generation of artists of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) heritage who understand their cultural history is part of a larger story that encompasses many art histories. She creates objects endowed with stories of transmission, cultivation, and survival. Her art seeks to fill the voids left by wounds, while opening up each scar to new possibilities that refuse to see them as an end in and of themselves. She is simultaneously in dialogue with SWANA ancestors, hard contemporary realities, and dreams for a future aligned with communal hopes and aspirations." —Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-chief and Co-founder, Hyperallergic