“We need to look around us.”
We met prize-winning photographer Hrair Sarkissan from Syria, whose thought-provoking images show us the presence of the absence.
“Most of the work I do is pretty much related to history. Even though something happened decades or centuries ago, it’s still very relevant today because there’s so much emotion, feeling, and tragedy there.”
“And for me, the most interesting, the most important thing in my work is the emotions of the people all over the world who live through these traumas. If you pass in front of these images without knowing what they are, I don’t think you would stand in front of them and have a very long gaze at each image. But once you realize the title, that’s where you get a wake-up call.”
“I am driven by or attracted to the idea of the invisible things we keep seeing. I want to wake up the viewer because we keep doing the same things that we did 100, 200, 300 years ago.”
Hrair Sarkissian (b. 1973 in Syria) lives in London. He earned foundational training at his father’s photographic studio in Damascus and is considered one of the leading conceptual photographers of his generation. Spanning photography, moving images, sculpture, sound, and installation, Sarkissian’s practice creates meditative dreamscapes in some moments and deathscapes in others—sites where the muted voice, absent from the frame, is temporarily offered space to breathe.
Sarkissian is on the Advisory Board of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. His 2020 exhibition at The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, was the first solo exhibition of a Syrian artist in the United States. Selected recent exhibitions include the British Art Show 9, the 14th Sharjah Biennial, the Brighton Photo Biennial, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Baltic Contemporary Art Centre in Newcastle, the 10th Bamako Encounters African Biennial of Photography, the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial (awarded the Golden Lion), Tate Modern in London, the New Museum in New York, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
His mid-career survey exhibition opened in October 2021 at the Sharjah Art Foundation and toured the Bonniers Museum in Stockholm (2022) and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (2022/23). The exhibition brought together two major new commissions and more than a dozen of his most significant bodies of work from the preceding 15 years.
Hrair Sarkissian was interviewed by Anders Mørch in March 2024. The recording took place at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, in connection with Sarkissian’s exhibition, The Presence of Absence.
Camera: Anders Mørch
Edited by: Anders Mørch
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024
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