This piece was first pubslihed in Hadara Magazine

By Anna Seaman

For Hrair Sarkissian’s first mid-career survey, he has created a major new work, Last Seen (2018-2021), commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Whilst one could consider them as portraits, the photographs capture the spot where a missing person’s family last saw them alive. The 50 pieces, politically charged and loaded with sentiment, were taken over the course of four years and in five countries: Lebanon, Kosovo, Bosnia, Argentina, and Brazil. The power of the images lies in the fact that the absences tell the story. The missing person has in many cases been missing for more than three or four decades, and the family left behind is waiting either for them to return or to locate their remains. Sarkissian describes the families he met as living with “a phantom of a person” and a pain that is so much harder to process than the finality of death.

“It was one of the toughest projects I have ever done because the stories are living memories but unresolved,” Sarkissian says. “For these families, their lives stopped the moment the person disappeared, and since then they are living in a holding space. The only thing they want to do before they die is to find an answer.”

This space that he talks about, and the empty spaces he captures in the images, reflect the emptiness in the families’ lives. And again, this adds to their impact. These quiet images convey strong statements about an ongoing problem with corrupt dictatorships where people can go missing without explanation.

LAST SEEN (2018-21) These 50 photographs, taken over four years in five countries, politically charged and loaded with sentiment, capture the spot where a missing person’s family last saw them alive. EXECUTION SQUARES (2008, top) A series of 14 photographs depicting the sites of public executions in Syria. Each shows a square where executions took place, for civil rather than political crimes.

“I am trying to find a way to show a problem that we are living but in a way that is easier to digest than horrific images that we see in the mainstream media. I am trying to find a way to deliver a message to the audience so that they start thinking and reacting to the situation.”

In that way, does Sarkissian see himself as an activist?

“No, I really don’t see myself as an activist, I see myself as a very emotional person, and what I am trying to do is to wake people up and to wake up their emotions. I feel that, as humanity in this age, we are in a coma. One war starts and the other ends; it is never ending. I am fed up and it makes me angry so I want to tell these stories.”

The emotions of each story are ingrained in every series that he produces. However, whilst universal in his messages, much of his work stems from something deeply personal. Sarkissian is a Syrian-Armenian who grew up in Damascus (he now lives in London) learning his life-long passion for photography in his father’s photo studio. He draws upon personal and collective memory, narrating stories that official records and sources cannot tell, and each and every one is almost visceral in its emotion.

In Sharjah, alongside two major commissions that will anchor the show—the second, Little Apple (working title) (2021/2022) was commissioned by the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht—many of his older works will be displayed such as the Execution Squares series from 2008. Depicted in this series are squares across Syrian cities where public hangings used to take place. The inspiration behind this work stems from a memory that the artist has of himself as an 11-year-old boy, walking to school and coming across three bodies hanging in the square near his house. The experience was so traumatic that even now he cannot erase the memory from his mind. He took up photography as a way to reassure himself—by collecting physical evidence that the bodies were no longer there but in his memory. However, it failed.

BACKGROUND (2012) This series, shot in six Middle Eastern cities, marks the wane of studio portraiture in the region. With sitters absent, the backdrops become symbols of lost tradition and time.

“That’s when I got disappointed with the medium of photography. I thought I would lean on this medium and try to heal myself and convince myself that the bodies were gone. But they are always there. Every time I see those images, I see them.”

This highlights the artist’s ongoing fascination with what is visible and what is invisible and the intangible space in between. The relationship between memory and reality is at the core of his practice and is what connects all his work. As such, it speaks directly to the heart of his viewer.

The survey—curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, director of collections and senior curator, Sharjah Art Foundation; Dr. Theodor Ringborg, artistic director, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm; and Stijn Huijts, artistic director at the Bonnefanten—is titled
The Other Side of Silence. The title alludes to the skill Sarkissian has in drawing his viewer in and letting them reflect upon the silences he leaves. The exhibition is an expansion on a show in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, that Kholeif curated. The Sharjah iteration includes a sound installation titled Deathscape. Audiences will enter a dark space with no visuals and be greeted with the sounds of forensic archaeologists brushing, hammering and sifting through the soil of a mass grave in Spain. Whilst ostensibly talking about a global issue, the spark of inspiration here comes from another strikingly harrowing personal memory.

“In 1997, I went with my mother to Deir Ezzor in Syria, which is the biggest mass grave of Armenians, and formerly a pilgrimage site for Armenians. I remember scratching the soil with my fingers and pieces of bones were coming out of the earth. It was a tough day for me because when we returned home my grandfather passed away on the same day. The sound of scratching stayed with me all those years; it will always be engraved in my mind.”

IN BETWEEN (2006) This series grew from an inconsistency in Sarkissian’s own identity. Visiting Armenia, the reality of the country did not match the image of a proud nation held by the diaspora. The snow is a blanket that obstructs our vision, hiding the reality beneath.

Whilst Sarkissian addresses the atrocities of war, genocide and oppression, he prefers to use more subtle methods to narrate these issues. “I inherited the Armenian genocide, but I never experienced the atrocities. So maybe I am doing this to give myself a tiny percentage of the feelings, and maybe I can transmit that to the rest of us. Going back to my sound work, I don’t want to torture the audience and force them to go through this, but even if they listen for a few seconds I want to evoke something.”

Perhaps one of the most rewarding elements of diving into Sarkissian’s practice is that peeling back the layers reveals more about the context. From the personal kernel of memory at the core, the work pans out through regional history to worldwide struggles. And, although much of his work focuses on human struggle, one series that was initially exhibited at Sharjah Biennial in 2019 tells the plight of the northern bald ibis. Having been declared extinct in the wild in 1989, in 2002 a surviving colony of seven birds was discovered in the Syrian desert near Palmyra. The colony was intensively studied and protected until the war in Syria broke out, and then disappeared again around the time Palmyra was destroyed in 2014. Final Flight (2018-2019) consists of seven resin casts of the northern bald ibis skull, an archival inkjet print of the last photograph taken over Palmyra of the birds, a hand-milled relief on aluminium of the birds’ migration route from Syria to Ethiopia, and a film capturing the route in bird’s-eye view.

“Sometimes telling the story of an animal can be more impactful than the plight of humans. If something is too difficult to look at, we block it. My piece on the ibis bird is another way of telling the tale of war.”

As the show opens in October in Sharjah, Sarkissian will travel to Anatolia to find the village where his grandfather once lived. There, he will make Little Apple, the film commissioned by the Bonnefanten Museum. Always working, always delving deeper, the artist says he doesn’t consider his career, only the ideas in his mind. “I don’t think about my future or my career, as long as I can I will keep doing this and for me, this is the drive. I will keep on going.”

Hrair Sarkissian: The Other Side of Silence will run from 30 October 2021 to 30 January 2022 at Sharjah Art Foundation.

Between Memory And Reality