Anahit Cass – Art as a Pathway to Justice and Healing

Art shaped by activism, ancestry, and a vision for a compassionate future

Anahit Cass’s art bridges human rights advocacy with visual storytelling, addressing identity, social justice, and healing through powerful portraits and conceptual projects, which connect past and future while envisioning a more compassionate world.

Anahit Cass is a visionary artist whose work confronts some of the most pressing issues of our time—identity, resilience, and social justice. With a distinctive background that melds her legal expertise in human rights with her remarkable talent in visual storytelling, Cass creates powerful narratives through her photography, video, sculpture, and writing. Her work invites viewers to engage with themes of displacement, cultural heritage, and futurist ideals, skilfully blending ancestral symbolism with visions of collective healing. Cass’s art is an evocative call to imagine a world transformed: one where empathy, inclusivity, and reparative justice take root.

Through projects like “Reparations of the Heart: Toward a SWANA Futurity” and “Borderlands Under Fire”, Cass speaks to the complexities of the diaspora experience, the impact of intergenerational trauma, and the strength found in community and shared stories. Her images, which depict stateless persons, asylum seekers, and other marginalized communities, offer a poignant glimpse into lives marked by resilience. Her narratives are raw, honest, and profoundly human, uniting historical motifs with speculative futures to underscore the dignity and hope that transcend suffering. Anahit Cass is not only a chronicler of cultural history but a creator of alternative futures—futures grounded in empathy, self-determination, and justice for all.

Anahit Cass is a transformative artist whose compelling work unites empathy, cultural heritage, and justice to inspire visions of collective healing.

How does your background as a lawyer working with asylum seekers and nonprofits influence the themes and approach in your art?

My art practice examines issues of human rights and social justice, and these concerns were influenced by my experience as a lawyer. The most important work I’ve done was embedded in opportunities to help individuals and organizations seeking social justice. Experiencing the injustice and oppression people face through their legal struggles provided insight into their lived experiences, making me more committed than ever to these issues in my art practice. I produced two conceptual documentary projects exploring the human cost of undeclared war and women’s nonviolent resistance. Some of the portraits in my recent work tell stories of asylum seekers and stateless persons. These are among the most important works I’ve created.

Your work often explores the intersections of identity, community, healing, and hope. Can you describe how your own identity as a queer, mixed-ethnicity, diasporan American shapes these themes?

I grew up in a time when it wasn’t okay to be queer and witnessed the destructive effects on friends and relatives. In the portrait To Be Seen and Loved two Palestinian men, long-time friends, express the grief that can sometimes be experienced being queer and the joy of their friendship in a vulnerable and emotional representation of masculinity. Identity and representation are important to our mental health and well-being, and my work gives space to the expression of multiple identities and experiences. Representing their joy is radical when most of what we see of Palestinians and other SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) peoples are suffering and violence.

In “Reparations of the Heart: Toward a SWANA Futurity,” you touch on themes of reparation and collective healing. Could you elaborate on how this concept is expressed in both your writing and visual art?

We live in a world where history is written by dominant powers, not those most affected by events. I’m the descendant of genocide survivors, forcibly displaced from our indigenous lands by a colonialist regime. For Indigenous people and all those who have endured as my family has, identity, community, healing, and hope are important to our survival and future. Taking the agency to tell our own stories instead of accepting what is said about us is part of the healing process. To create works together that envision a world of compassion and inclusivity can make space in our hearts for reparations. The portraits in my book, like Salpi and Nancy in Flight, tell the stories of the people who collaborated on them through connection to ancestors, re-visioning past and present, and envisioning better futures. The text also provides space for telling these stories as essays, quotes, and short stories.

Collaboration plays a central role in your projects. What does the process of creating a shared vision with others look like, and how does it impact the final work?

Making portraits for my book was a time-consuming process. People came to my studio, and we shared stories of family history, culture, religion, and life experiences. With an understanding of their stories, I photographed them in the clothing they chose and with their memory objects. Afterwards, I made Armenian coffee and read their cups. This divination ritual creates a strong connection between people, and it always turns up interesting things. I created the collaged backgrounds later based on their connections to their ancestral homelands and where they live in the diaspora. The image “By the Light of Our Moons” came from a collaboration where we discussed the concept of stewardship of the land as a necessary part of a viable future and the leadership women could take in a movement for the care and preservation of the planet. The woman in the photograph wears a traditional Palestinian garment, Armenian jewelry, and tattoos of Armenian and other SWANA motifs. She exists in a future version of indigenous land returned to the people.

Your art merges ancestral traditions with futurist visions. Can you explain the importance of combining historical motifs with futuristic elements, and how it serves your overall message?

Historical motifs provide cultural symbols. Combining historical and futuristic elements envisions futures where we’re connected across time and space, drawing on the best of the ancestral to construct an alternative future. An example is the diptych “Tatik yev Papik”. The woman in this portrait embodies her great-grandmother and grandfather, and the love story they shared despite surviving genocide. It’s set in part of her ancestral homeland, now under occupation, envisioning it as a healed place returned to its indigenous people.

How do the works of science fiction authors like Octavia Butler and Rivers Solomon influence your approach to creating “transformational” art that stimulates empathy and envisions positive futures?

Their works speak to profound injustice and oppression yet imagine alternative futures where people who’ve suffered can live healed and whole, taking control of their lives and futures. When I read their works, I recognize the present reality where violence and repression do exist, but I also feel the future and its promise, embedding that in my work. Images have immense power to affect our thoughts and imaginings and can be used for healing and reconciliation as we imagine our future.

EDITOR’S HIGHLIGHTS

“Being featured in WOWwART means gaining visibility not just in print edition, but across the entire media spectrum in the US, UK, Europe and beyond”

Read How WOWwART Empowers Artists