Ohan Breiding / Shoghig Halajian SOUVENIR

Souvenir is a collaborative project by Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian that coalesces two seemingly disparate stories together—a family member's experience of surviving a tsunami while snorkeling and the longest transoceanic journey of marine organisms. It documents plastic debris that traveled from Tōhoku, Japan across the Pacific Ocean over the span of a decade and washed ashore on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America in 2022, covered with a diverse ecosystem of marine life. Presented as a video and photographic installation, Souvenir employs various image technologies—including an underwater camera, a cell phone, a drone camera—to build a visual vocabulary that can speak to the multi-scalar impacts of personal and ecological loss, and to speculate on how marine life can shed light on new strategies of survival across species and coasts. Souvenir was on view March 10 - April 28, 2023 HALLWALLS CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, BUFFALO, NY