Los Angeles Public Library Opens New Exhibition: Ara Oshagan: “How the Future May Hold”

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Public Library will open the exhibition “Ara Oshagan: How the Future May Hold” in Central Library’s Annenberg Gallery on Saturday, October 18, 2025. The exhibition entangles past, present and future while imagining a tomorrow when the idea of a displaced people returning to indigenous lands is both a dream and a possibility.

The bilingual (English and Armenian) exhibition will run through January 11, 2026 in the Annenberg Gallery at Central Library, 630 W. Fifth St. in downtown Los Angeles.

The multi-dimensional and layered exhibition begins with photographic work that reflects Oshagan’s own sense of displaced diasporic identity through the community life and spaces of the Armenian community in Los Angeles. In a new series, Oshagan further considers his diasporic journeys and the right of return by sourcing medieval Armenian talismanic scrolls and adding photographic elements.

A large-scale display of portraits and testimonies of communities recently forcibly displaced from their homeland of Nagorno Karabagh/Artsakh continues the theme of diaspora, focusing on this community that became diasporic overnight.

Return is also at the core of another new series of works where Oshagan considers what might happen if the displaced Armenian community of Nagorno Karabagh/Artsakh returns to their indigenous homeland in the year 2125. One hundred years after their exile, the great-grand-children of Artsakh’s displaced communities are able to see their rugged native land for the first time. Oshagan asks: “What is their connection to the land of their ancestors exiled in 2023?”

“With our newest exhibition, Ara Oshagan: How the Future May Hold, Los Angeles Public Library will once again shine a spotlight on one of our city’s diverse communities,” said City Librarian John F. Szabo, “and will open a discussion about the history of the Armenian diaspora, examining what it means to a people to be displaced from their homeland.”

Oshagan is a multi-disciplinary artist who employs deep research, a complex personal immigration story, and photography to address a culture’s diasporic identity, the afterlives of displacement and colonization, right of return, and (un)imagined futures.

A descendant of families who were displaced from Western Armenia by the Armenian Genocide, Oshagan was born in Beirut, Lebanon and grew up in an Armeniancommunity. Displaced once again by the Lebanese civil war, he and his family fled to the United States where he came of age.

Oshagan wrote, “I do not belong to any single country nor language nor nationality. I live in-between several languages and cultures, among multiple ways of thinking and ways of life. My identity is transnational and ambiguous: it is a process.”

“The Library has a longstanding commitment to highlight the contributions and history of our city’s many ethnic communities, and we are honored to share this latest exhibition with Angelenos,” said Mayra Valadez, President of the Board of Library Commissioners.

The exhibition will include a collaboration with author Micheline Aharonian Marcom, who has published eight books, including a trilogy of novels about the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century.

A new recipient of the nation’s highest honor for library service—the National Medal from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Los Angeles Public Library serves the largest and most diverse urban population of any library in the nation. Its Central Library, 72 branch libraries, collection of more than eight million books, state-of-the-art technology accessible at lapl.org and thousands of public programs provide everyone with free and easy access to information and the opportunity for lifelong learning.