Hrair Sarkissian: History in 3D

For Hrair Sarkissian, photography is a medium for excavating memory, loss, and historical rupture, transforming the photographer into a conduit through whom personal, historical, and spatial narratives intersect.

Across the artist’s practice, projects both anchor to and transcend the documentary image-making tradition. Take, for example, the artist’s photographic installation My Father and I (2010), which was created after Sarkissian’s father decided to close the Sarkissian Photo Center. This was the first colour photo lab in Syria, which Sarkissian’s father founded in 1976 in Damascus, where Sarkissian was born.

Upon learning the news, Sarkissian flew to Damascus to document the studio where he first trained in photography, and asked his father to take his portrait as the studio’s final client. The resulting installation features black-and-white self-portraits that the artist’s father took in his youth, with poses that Sarkissian then replicated in the colour images his father took of him. Each set forms a row presented next to a large, colour image of the studio itself, creating a temporal and relational landscape of two faces mirroring one another from across a generation.

What emerges through this intimate study—‘the most intense, silent conversation’ the artist ever had with his father, Sarkissian once noted—is a work that functions as a portrait of time as much as a personal study.

Whether confronting personal or collective histories, Sarkissian has said that he uses photography as a tool to seek answers to his memories,¹ and he gravitates toward sites where the visible and invisible collide. In Between (2006) comprises 16 images of snowy Armenian landscapes, their vastness reflecting the distance between the artist and his Armenian heritage, which he learned about from the stories that his grandfather recounted as a refugee in Syria; while the video Homesick (2014) shows Sarkissian destroying a scale replica of the apartment building in Damascus where his parents live.

Articulating a different kind of distance is Execution Squares (2008): 14 archival inkjet prints of eerily empty plazas in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Latakia, Damascus, where public executions once took place. Shot in the morning when executions typically occurred, an uncanny stillness—intensified by the photograph as the ultimate still life—holds space for the testimonies embedded in these locations.

At times, Sarkissian eschews the image altogether, as with Deathscape (2020), a five-channel sound installation playing recordings in a black room of archaeologists digging up mass tombs dating back to Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Here, the artist responds sensitively to what it means to represent pain as a producer of images, considering what such histories might require, even if what is needed is no image at all.

Within this frame, a clear throughline runs from Deathscape to works like Execution Squares and Last Seen (2018–2021). The latter photographic series documents the spaces where people who were forcibly disappeared were last seen—in Lebanon, Argentina, Brazil, Kosovo and Bosnia—including in their homes. Each project considers seemingly empty spaces as anything but vacant: charged instead with unresolved histories of violence, erasure, and, in the end, love, connection, loss, and grief.

Most recently, Sarkissian has turned to three-dimensional printing to conjure the spectres he has deftly captured through his camera. Particularly for Stolen Past (2025), a commission for the Aichi Triennale curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi, Sarkissian employed the lithophane technique developed in the 19th century, whereby porcelain panels appear blank until lit from behind to reveal sculpted images.

Using a 3D printer and PLA, a biodegradable thermoplastic, Sarkissian produced 90 white lithophane panels, each resting on a tomb-stone-like plinth and revealing a holographic black-and-white image when illuminated. Appearing like ghostly negatives, each print features an artefact from the Raqqa Museum in Northern Syria. The installation functions as a material witness to the Islamic State’s occupation of the area from 2013 to 2017, when much of the museum’s collection of some 8,000 objects – spanning Paleolithic tools to medieval, blue-glazed Raqqa-ware – was destroyed or looted, leaving about 880 items with roughly 40 now on display.

Stolen Past is as concerned with the irreparable damage inflicted on Syria’s cultural heritage due to war, as he is with the heroic efforts of local communities to salvage what they could with what means they had. But more than a monument to such efforts, the work also functions as an alert to identify artefacts that may have entered the global market, not to mention a reminder of the importance of photographing, indexing, and archiving cultural objects to prevent their complete loss or erasure.

Holding space for recuperation amid displacement is at the heart of Sarkissian’s practice. Consider Final Flight (2017–2019), an installation that traces the migratory journey of the Northern Bald Ibis, through a model of the bird’s skull, drone footage of their migratory path, and fragmentary sketches. The species, we learn, was believed to be extinct until a surviving colony of seven was discovered in 2002 in the Syrian desert near Palmyra, only to be lost again amid the chaos of the Syrian war.

Beautifully composed, a model of the bird’s skull is angled to face the drone footage of its migratory flight: at once a damning indictment of man-made violence and a reminder that life can always return to the land, if only humans would allow it.

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