Book your place to come and experience a virtual reality work by Madeleine K., Stories from My Grandmother's House, which tells the story of the artist's Armenian and Palestinian family over several centuries.
Growing up in the diaspora, Madeleine has designed this project to experience her heritage as if it were a memory. She has combined archival research and first-person interviews with digital technologies to explore how we can reconnect communities with lost spaces and cultures. How can VR offer us spatial memories of places that are no longer accessible?
Set foot in a room in the artist’s grandmother’s house in Haifa in the 1930s, full of her grandfather’s paintings and decorative elements reconstructed from online and family archives, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of both sides of the family. Through different objects, you will access scenes from the family story, from a shipwreck off the coast of Akka in the 1780s to the adoption of her grandfather in Aleppo during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, through to her grandparents meeting by chance in Palestine in 1932.
This event is part of Heritage of Displacement: Oral Histories from the UK Armenian Communities (2023–2026), funded by a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, thanks to National Lottery players.
About the Speaker
Madeleine K. is an artist and experience designer from London. Her work uses immersive technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality to create portals – interventions in physical and digital environments designed to hold space for under-represented stories from human and non-human worlds. Powerful and empathetic, her work focuses on knowing through feeling. She is dedicated to engaging audiences with alternative ways of understanding the world through rich, multi-sensory experiences. She has exhibited at Breeze Film Festival, the London Festival of Architecture, Brompton Cemetery Chapel and London Design Festival. She has over 10 years of experience in the creative technology sector, designing and delivering immersive projects for clients including The Smithsonian, Bestival, IKEA & Amazon. She holds a BA in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins and was the recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship at the RCA.
