An Artist Considers the Trauma of His Two Homelands

posted on: Apr 27, 2015

“Nagorno” is a Russian word for “mountain,” while “Karabakh” is a word of Turkic and Persian origin meaning “black garden.” When joined by a hyphen, the two words denote the boiling point of the Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave — one of post-Soviet Europe’s “frozen conflicts” — that doubles as a mountainous graveyard. A de facto independent but unrecognized state, Nagorno-Karabakh is ethnically Christian Armenian but was given to Shiite Muslim Azerbaijan by the Soviets in 1922. To say that the region has been a “standing dispute” since then, and even to an extent beforehand, would be a serious understatement. In a six-year war over the territory, begun in 1988 as Soviet rule tapered off and waged by Azerbaijani troops and Armenian secessionists, about 30,000 people died and over a million were displaced (and remain so to this day). A Russian-brokered ceasefire was signed in 1994, but it has been frequently violated.

Imagined Futures, a solo show of Syrian-Armenian, London-based artist Hrair Sarkissian’s previously unseen photography and new video work at The Mosaic Rooms in London gives a potent sense of a mountainous region that has become afflicted, estranged, and dark with blood. Sarkissian’s images are so acutely sad they puncture.

Front Line (2007) is a series of images — 12 landscape photos and a photo installation of 17 portraits — exploring the 1988–1994 Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and its consequences. The substantial photographs of the mountainous region are eerily devoid of human life. They depict flimsy shanties; outmoded war machinery, like rusted tanks (in a stray sign of life, a small square of space on one of the tanks has been painted a bright blue and yellow); and piles upon piles of rubble. As the only icons of permanence, the rubble and the mountains seem to apathetically swallow buildings, life, everything.

Source: hyperallergic.com