The Future as Memorial: Commemorating Hrant Dink
Date and Time
The Friends of Hrant DInk are pleased to present the Annual Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture with
Delal Dink
Director of the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey
On the 19th anniversary of Hrant Dink's assassination, his daughter Delal Dink reflects on the work of the Hrant Dink Foundation and its efforts to rethink commemoration not as a static act of remembrance, but as an ongoing invitation to an alternative future. The Foundation approaches its work as "remembrance in action" - a living practice refusing to merely mourn loss, but actively build the world Hrant Dink envisioned.
Through hate speech monitoring and counter-narratives, community-based historical and archival research, cultural heritage initiatives, Turkey-Armenia normalization efforts, and the 23.5 Memory Site where tens of thousands gather annually not as passive observers, but as active participants in a shared act of witnessing, the Foundation practices commemorating not just what was lost, but what was hoped for.
This talk explores commemoration as dialogue and continued struggle: creating a new language where memory connects rather than divides, where wounds become sites of transformation, and where the future itself might become the memorial.
In times of deepening polarization, when difference is weaponized and borders - both physical and symbolic - multiply, the work of the Hrant Dink Foundation embodies what Hrant Dink insisted upon:
Come, let us first understand each other...
Come, let us first respect each other's pain...
Come, let us first let one another live…
—Hrant Dink
Sponsor: Hrant Dink Memorial CMES Fund
Contact: Liz Flanagan