'A pair of Mary-Jane-style shoes appears on the cover of Karen Babayan’s book Blood Oranges Dipped In Salt, 20121. Satin gleams in the light and deep shadows draw the eye to the edge of a projected image. Turn the book over and this projected image is the family photograph featured on the back. It has been cropped, showing two figures from the waist down, standing perhaps in a back garden. One is a girl, the other is an adult woman: they are both wearing the same 1920’s style shoe. They stand close together in a way that suggests there is a close family link between them. An initial impression of the shoes worn by the woman and on the front cover is that they could be one-and-the-same. This leads to a closer look. There is the trace of another photograph inside them: imprinted into the soles is a bride in one and a groom in the other. They have now become wedding shoes.

The shoes and the photograph of two female relatives are key to the reading of Blood Oranges Dipped In Salt. Images are used sparingly by the artist, and appear at particular points in the book – the beginning and the end. They are visual bookends to a series of family narratives. These narratives are not presented through conventional linear time, but one that circulates back and forth, organised through chapter titles taken from a short poem by a great-great-great-aunt. The historical timeline is 1604 to 2011; the geographical cover is England, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Armenia and Canada. The book presents seven generations of stories, which together track what it means to be Armenian; to know history however distance or speculative; to retain yet re-invent identity in the face of displacement and even genocide; and to not forget. Although these stories are conveyed through the printed word, many of the stories have their foundations in the traditions of oral history, and as the book unfolds, the reader becomes aware that the artist is taking the reader on another journey. This is through an archive, a family archive where stories are clearly shaped, as the artist describes, by ‘loss, displacement, migration, immigration and assimilation.’ Although not shown in the book, family photographs and albums have nevertheless been crucial to the telling, and retelling of some of these stories that the artist describes as ‘oral family heirlooms’.