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Sarkissian
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Murtaza Vali
With an essay by Vali Mahlouji
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Essay
Sarkissian
The Abraaj Group
Art Prize 2013
Foreword Savita Apte
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An extra ordinary Introduction
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Murtaza Vali
Contemplating Acts of Witnessing
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The Photographs of Hrair Sarkissian Vali Mahlouji
Background for Background Photographing Disappearance
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Hrair Sarkissian in conversation with Murtaza Vali Biography, Exhibition History and Bibliography
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Writer's Biography
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Acknowledgements
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Photography Credits
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Foreword The Abraaj Group Art Prize was established to showcase exceptional artistic talent from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and to focus inter national attention on the multiple loci of creativity in the region. Since its inception five years ago, the prize has been both a stepping stone and a turning point in the careers of many of its winners. Over the years, it has consistently grown and evolved so that it remains pertinent to the demands of the artistic community it serves. The cast of winners now numbers twentyone and each acts as an inspiration to an upcoming generation of art practitioners from this region. The prize is made possible thanks to the Abraaj Group, which is now the leading private equity investor operating in the global growth markets of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The daunting task of selecting works that traverse national, regional and linguistic borders whilst being firmly rooted in the region as well as pushing the boundaries of mediums to their limits is no mean task. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is distinctly fortunate
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to have the expertise, patience and good will of an exceptional selection committee. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Antonia Carver, Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng, Julia PeytonJones and Murtaza Vali. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is grateful to its curator Laura Egerton and to the 2013 guest curator Murtaza Vali for their immeasurable support and calm guidance in ensuring that the ambitious proposals from each artist are transformed into works of art that engage the viewer by sharpening our attention to the ordinary and everyday in our lives. It gives me enormous pleasure to congratulate the 2013 recipients of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and leave you to enjoy their new artworks: A Very Short History of Tall Men by Vartan Avakian, Common Elements by Iman Issa, The Miraculous Lives of This and That by Huma Mulji, Background by Hrair Sarkissian and FIRE/ CAST/DRAW by Rayyane Tabet. This publication has been conceived by Murtaza Vali and designed by the New York based firm Project
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Projects. We are delighted to have commissioned in-depth essays from key voices focusing on the artists’ practice and their commission for the Abraaj Group Art Prize. Walid Sadek and Nat Muller on Vartan Avakian, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Iman Issa, Adnan Madani on Huma Mulji, Vali Mahlouji on Hrair Sarkissian and Haig Aivazian on Rayyane Tabet. We thank them for their scholarship and insight. I welcome you all to extra|ordinary: the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013.
Foreword
Savita Apte Chair Abraaj Group Art Prize
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Murtaza Vali
Essay
An extra  ordinary Introduction
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‘Ordinary’ is derived from the Latin ordo, meaning order. To be ordinary is to be a part of the natural order of things, to be normal, regular, routine, to display no special or distinguishing characteristics. Given this etymology it is hardly surprising that the incorporation of the ordinary and everyday into intellectual and artistic discourse began in earnest in the years following World War II. Obliterating any and all traces of prior order and routine, the war brought the banal and quotidian aspects of human life, usually overlooked and taken for granted, into stark relief. For the various thinkers and artists who championed a post-war recuperation of the ordinary, this strategy was not simply restorative, not a conservative return to lost order. Instead, the rupture of the war served as a reboot of sorts, priming everyday life for reevaluation and renewal. For philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose Critique of Everyday Life, first published in French in 1947, triumphantly declared the quotidian as a register worthy of theoretical and critical attention, this register, or “level” as he called it, was where the human condition was fully realised
and realisable: “The human world is not defined simply by the historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological and political super-structures. It is defined by this intermediate and mediating level: everyday life.”1 For Lefebvre, and others who followed, the disrup tion provided an opportunity to refresh the status quo, creating a blank slate on which one could reimagine the potential of daily life, and through it work towards a better and more just future world. Routine would be reset and the ordinary and everyday would serve as the wellspring for subsequent social, political and artistic revolution.2 Additionally, the incorporation of specifically those aspects of life and culture tradi tionally deemed insignificant or unimportant by high art and elite culture seemed to be a truly egalitarian gesture; by emphasising the most common parts of human experience, post-war art and literature opened up to the broadest possible audience, bringing art one step closer to life.3 Working in places where the burden of history and politics is strongly felt and can be oppressively
1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 2002, p. 45. 2 Lefebvre asserts, “it is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations
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which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity.” ibid., p. 44. 3 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993, pp. 119–123.
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over-determined, where the certainties of daily life are far from certain, the five artists in ‘extra|ordinary’, like their avant-garde predecessors, seek out the wisdom of the routine, the less significant, and the easily overlooked. Though varied in subject matter and media, their works all spring forth from the rich bedrock of the ordinary, tapping into its democratic promise. They all draw on and occupy that minor register of culture, history, politics and contemporary life that encompasses not only the quotidian, but also the private, personal and domestic, the popular and vernacular, the lost and forgotten, and the ludic world of children. These works are not produced by heroic gestures of creation but through processes of gradual accumulation, through the meditative repeti tion of small acts of making and selecting, seeing and showing, a mode of production firmly grounded in the rhythms and spaces of daily life. Fragmented, wholes made up of many, often small, parts, these works emphasise—to borrow a turn of phrase Susan Sontag used to describe the unique dramatic logic of Samuel Beckett’s plays—“microstructure”, at the level of
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subject matter, process and form.4 Finally, they ask us to recalibrate our vision and attention, to lean in and get a better look, scour backgrounds, pay close atten tion to details, read all the fine print, allow the dense web of information and association embedded within to leisurely unfold. They do not strive to transform or transcend the ordinary. Instead, they humbly remind us of all that is extra in the ordinary itself.
The origin of Hrair Sarkissian’s Background (2013) is an ordinary image he took of a plain white studio backdrop in his father’s photography studio and laboratory in Damascus shortly before its anticipated closure. Though the studio has stayed open, its near demise seemed to mark the end of an era, coincid ing with the eclipse of a specific tradition of studio portraiture—integral to the twentieth century history and development of the medium in the Middle East—by the spread of digital technology. Sarkissian decided to commemorate this waning tradition by documenting
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4 Quoted in ibid., p. 120.
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examples of one of its central artefacts, the studio backdrop. He travelled to and visited studios in six major Middle Eastern cities—Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, Byblos, Cairo and Istanbul—and shot hundreds of examples of backdrops he found there. He finally selected one for and from each of these cities, though he is careful not to reveal the location where each of the photographs was taken, leaving that assignment up to the viewer’s imagination and ideas of each city. Shot head on, the six images of Background document studio settings that are more theatrical than the minimalist one that initiated the project. These tableaux are illusory, constructed to encourage flights of fancy in those who pose in front on them. Embellished with props, some suggest an actual elsewhere—a sunny beach, a lush garden, a library or storeroom packed full of books. Others are more evocative: an air of disquiet and mystery, heightened by the absence of a sitter, pervades a setting con sisting of a chair standing in front of a faintly pink background, a composition that bears an uncanny resemblance to Andy Warhol’s famous ‘electric chair’
images. In every photograph the frame exceeds the tableaux it documents, transforming its subject from setting to object, from a prop for fiction to material fact, from extraordinary to ordinary. Without the distraction of a posing figure in the foreground, our focus shifts to the backdrop itself, and to the materi als, tools, and spaces of studio portraiture. Largescale, backlit and hung unframed like backdrops, these brilliant images monumentalise their subject. But they are also elegiac; the spaces and backdrops appear disused, like ruins or relics of a tradition that has already run its course, the absent figure introducing a melancholy that radiates out from the emptiness.
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Contemplating the Act of Witnessing
Vali Mahlouji
Essay
The Photographs of Hrair Sarkissian
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. —Roland Barthes1 Born in Damascus to parents of Armenian descent, Hrair Sarkissian ended up in London, where he currently resides, via Amsterdam, where he studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The devastating conflict that has engulfed Syria since 2011 has kept Sarkissian away from his family and homeland and effectively jettisoned him into an unexpected self-imposed exile. However, the discourse of exile and the psychology of the émigré are not entirely alien to Sarkissian. He is acutely conscious of the sensitivities, pre-occupations and the melan cholic sensibilities of dislocation and the associated compulsive, restorative drive for reunification with the ‘lost object’. Contemplation upon precisely these emotive realities is a primary driving force behind Sarkissian’s artistic enquiries and their aesthetic articulations. As he confesses, his photographs are
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, p. 38.
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the end products of prolonged periods of deep reflection on a particular topic and, as such, they represent mappings of emotions and affects embedded in the materiality of spaces. Sarkissian confirms that conscious thought plays a key role in his photographic process—that not much is intuitively informed or spontaneously derived. Instead, his art is compulsively driven by the concreteness of, for the most part, collective experiences of history, which the embattled self lives to resolve. Each of his series reflects such a negotiation across the dual trajectories of the personal and historical, where the photographic image no longer represents a frozen moment in time or an actual, material object as its subject of enquiry. What the photograph does represent—either individually or accumulatively across the series as a whole—is historical time. The subject is not captured in time that has already past (in the Barthesian sense) but is articulated across time. Sarkissian’s serial expressions formally and psychically enhance this notion of articulating across time versus in time,
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emphasising the necessity for repetition as a device for both reflection and resolution. An underlying meaning, distilled into a unique, unifying title, binds together the many photographs that make up a series; indeed, in certain instances the entire series is collectively a single work of art. This conceptual unity across individual photographs both expands and suspends time, imbuing further meaning through repetitive depiction. Repetition itself aids the photographer to negotiate a promise of remembering, a necessity for comprehending, a wishful restoration towards unity in the ultimate release of the embattled self as the author of trauma. Working across the elegiac poetics of loss, Sarkissian, the photographer as historian, consciously omits the referent from the frame of his photographs. The referent’s disappearance and the subject’s exclu sion from the material of the image act as a distancing device. The referent’s absence and the resulting dis tancing of the spectator (and photographer) enables the formulation of restrained articulations that do not allow the poetics of loss to be sentimentalised or
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romanticised, and bring the centrality of the event and the associative sensibility of the experience to the fore.
Let us turn to Sarkissian’s much discussed series Execution Squares (2008). The almost sublime serenity of these photographs harbours within the shattering and harrowing truth of acts of violent death. The series depicts public execution squares in three Syrian cities—Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia—shot at dawn, at about the same time when the death penalty by hanging is officially enacted. Though taken five years ago, in the context of the present day conflict raging through Syria these images assume an epic dimension. Epic, however, they always were, given the deeply humanitarian concern they embody, an ethical reaction to the disturbing nature of, on one hand, the vengeful act of hanging a citizen committed by the state, and, on
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Vision and Witness Most of my work is about how we see the invisible in the visible. —Hrair Sarkissian2
2 Hrair Sarkissian, conversation with author.
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the other hand, the public nature of such an act. Given recent atrocities committed by the Syrian state against its people the series seems uncannily prescient. Gently lit at dawn, these squares look like any other. They are familiar urban settings with old, new or unfinished residential and commercial constructions, tarmacked streets, weathered concrete surfaces, shrubs and palm trees, street lights and parked cars, cables crisscrossing overhead, and a plethora of signs, notices and advertisements. The appar ent harmony of these sites, the everydayness of the square and the deliberate quietude of the photograph distance us from the very reality central to the work. The title acts as sole signifier, demanding us as viewers to do more than just look. The direct, deliberate and bluntly descriptive title shocks us into reconsidering each image and its possible meanings, allowing us to recognise its true subject. The viewer is forced to know that which is nowhere to be seen. By omitting any evidence of the violence or the political implications of such violence, Sarkissian comments on the apparent invisibility of both the act
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and its victim, who remains anonymous and literally perishes. What was done at dawn in public is no longer on view or available to be seen. The apparatus of violence has been dismantled and stowed away, along with its victim, safely out of sight. What remains is only the knowing. In parallel, the camera’s long exposure brings the darkness of dawn into visibility. Sarkissian, who has effectively used darkness as both a formal and poetic trope in other work, originally intended the photograph to be dark, to simply capture that particu lar darkness of dawn. But, finally, he decided it would unnecessarily over-dramatise the image.3 Beyond contemplating the historical reality and the ephemerality of a life brutally extinguished, these photographs critique both the official and public nature of these executions. The absence of any referent broadens the address, focusing attention on society’s (and by association the viewer’s) apparent passivity, or even, conformity—forced or not—in the face of such an act of violation. Additionally, despite the act’s public nature, the omission of the central evidence minimises or near eradicates the potential
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3 Hrair Sarkissian, artist’s statements, http://www. hrairsarkissian.com, accessed December, 2012.
Execution Squares, 2008 Lambda print 125 × 160 cm
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for voyeuristic exploitation. Through this omission the photographer safely distances himself from the role of mediator between subject and its witness—the viewer. His approach remains subtle, intact and un-drama tised, staying clear of voyeuristic sentimentalisation. Sarkissian witnessed such a public execution as a child and has carried the traumatic memory of it ever since. Each time he passes through that square in central Damascus a flash of memory reminds him of the episode. As citizen and artist, the spectre of violence, man’s perishability in the face of such violence, and the inability to act in the face of this repeated violence, remain embedded, memorialised and memorised over time in the physicality of the squares. These accumulated emotional charges—visceral and personal as much as social and historical—embedded in the very materiality of things are what are frozen and recorded in these images. Captured through the camera’s lens the square carries specific memories and meanings for Sarkissian, which he conveys to us as viewers. His subtle and sophisticated treatment of such difficult subject
matter highlights the central question around the very nature of witnessing. This core question, central to the meaning of photography itself and its relation to reality, is highlighted by placing the viewer in a position of responsibility in relation to both image and subject matter; the viewer becomes witness. What is normally hidden from view resonates emotionally through these epic but contemplative photographs. Sarkissian’s practice places itself across a junction that highlights the gap between seeing and knowing and it is precisely across this fundamental gap that his work attains meaning and poignancy, both intellectual and emotional. The unsettling relationship between the picture (what is seen) and its context (what is known) underscores this gap and the inherent tension between the two is annotated between notions of experience, memory and meaning. Visualizing the Invisible While still a student in Amsterdam Sarkissian became interested in that city’s many deconsecrated churches, former sacred spaces now used for various public
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activities, like sports, music or dance clubs, and as private party venues. He recorded such interior spaces, dimly lit by natural light, in Churches (2009). “By intentionally using only sparse natural light, these spaces are invested with a sacredness and atmosphere they no longer possess through their function�, he explains.4 Through an acutely sensitive use of the limited light, Sarkissian imbues the space with a vision akin to the sacred. In these images, the invisible is made visible through a painterly use of light in otherwise darkened surroundings, albeit what is made visible is but an idea or ideal, or perhaps the artist’s emotional relationship with that idea or ideal. Zebiba (2007), a series of portraits Sarkissian shot in Cairo, is another example of his abiding interest in how the sacred can be seen, or is made to appear. During his stay in the city, Sarkissian encountered pious Muslim men bearing dark scars on their foreheads that result from prolonged and repeated pressure against a prayer stone or rug. In reality, these prayer scars, called zebiba in Arabic, can be exaggerated by applying acidic material like
lemon juice, which exacerbates damage to the skin and, hence, exaggerates visual intensity. Sarkissian explains his fascination with this practice: “On one level, the worshipper aspires to disinvest himself from earthly culture and render himself invisible through his devotion to the creator. Paradoxically, the desire to become invisible when facing God, renders him actually more conspicuous, and highlights him visibly, within his own social environment.”5 These images are a rare instance of the figure as subject in Sarkissian’s oeuvre. While the artist usually omits the figure here it is the primary subject and sole focus. Each shot consists of the head and shoulders of a man isolated against a dark background, drawing our attention to his determined expression, which appears both detachedly solemn and distinctly sad, and is tinged with latent aggression. Both the scar, which functions like a badge proudly declaring piety, and the expres sion seem confrontational. Though documenting an example of masculine posturing of piety appears to be Sarkissian’s primary interest, the question of the role played by such religious zealots in the political
4 ibid. 5 ibid.
Churches, 2009 Archival inkjet print 111 × 138 cm
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upheavals currently underway in Egypt gives these photographs a rich, contemporary resonance. Sarkissian adopts a comparable methodology in Istory (2011), a poignant set of photographs shot during a residency in Istanbul. While there Sarkissian visited and photographed the history sections of various semi-private and public libraries and archives in the city: the Archeological Museum and Topkapi Palace Libraries; the Atatürk Library at Taksim; the Ottoman Archives in the Government Office; and Garanti Bank’s Ottoman Bank Archive. Much of what is recorded in the documents held in these archival spaces relates to the history of the Ottoman Empire and the personalities, communities and minorities that were once part of it. Sarkissian explains his interest: “My own history is closely tied to these books and files, as my grandparents were forced to flee from Eastern Anatolia to Syria in 1915”.6 The trauma of this historical period, culminating in genocide in 1915, the violence wrought upon the Armenian community who had inhabited Anatolia since antiquity, the sudden severing of ancient ties to the land and the forced
6 ibid. 7 ibid.
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Zebiba, 2007 Archival inkjet print 60 × 60 cm each
exodus of survivors, has been imprinted on Armenian collective memory, and has had lasting effects on Sarkissian’s family. The official narrative of the events that transpired during this difficult period of late Ottoman history and the early years of the republic is a subject of growing controversy and debate in contemporary Turkey. In each of Sarkissian’s photographs, the archives remain closed, their contents inaccessible and unrevealed, like they are in reality. “I shot these dark and oppres sive spaces only with the light available in order to express the complex relationship that exists with the contents of the archives”.7 Witnessed and recorded by Sarkissian, the documents in these archives either deny or confirm his inherited personal history and the nature of his existence in the present. Istory, the series’ title, is clearly a play on history, and the omitted first letter might signify those parts of historical truth, buried in these archives, that remain missing and unseen. The title also, intentionally or not, declares the work’s personal dimension—the ‘I’ in Istory refers back to the artist’s own self. Like
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many of Sarkissian’s other photographic contempla tions, what is being articulated is a crisis of modes of testimony that are intimately bound to the question of witnessing. Once again, it is the omission of evidence, the invisibility of the central subject that endows Sarkissian’s work with an unexpected poignancy, a powerful personal and historical charge.
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Homeland Armenia, its unique culture, its poetry, music, and ancient churches (amongst the earliest to be built, as Armenians were the first nation to convert to Christianity), and its tumultuous and often bloody history, have all left an indelible mark on Sarkissian and his artistic practice. Aspects of Armenian culture, history, identity and its contemporary reality appear repeatedly in his work, operating on the parallel trajectories of the personal and the historical. Two years before Execution Squares Sarkissian embarked on a project entitled In Between (2007), a series of photographs of various urban and natural landscapes in Armenia, buried under a blanket of whitest snow.
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top Istory, 2011 Archival inkjet print 190 Ă— 150 cm bottom Istory, 2011 Archival inkjet print 150 Ă— 190 cm
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“The series grew out of an inconsistency in my own identity (born in Syria with Armenian origins) that came to the fore after visiting Armenia several times. The contemporary reality of Armenia struggling to survive and recover from the remains of the Soviet system, did not match the image of a self-assured and proud ‘Mother Armenia’ that circulates in the diaspora”, explains Sarkissian.8 One of the images in the series shows a large expanse of densely foggy sky encroaching on the sleepy city below it. The city’s contours are only subtly visible close to the frame’s lower edge. Though the low-rise buildings gradually emerge into view they remain subdued and subjugated by the snowy cover, which obscures all detail, dis tinction and activity. The dreamy landscape and the serenity of the photographic image obscure and soften darker realities, of both the harshness of everyday city life and the artist’s complex relationship to these urban spaces. Frozen under the snow, they are made invisible, hidden from our vision. As Sarkissian puts it, “The white blanket obstructs our vision and hides the reality underneath it, covering what we absolutely
do not want to see.”9 While the apparent message is to see that there is nothing to see, a deeper feeling of both disillusion and discontent simmers just below the surface. Sarkissian uses snow, fog and the sheer whiteness of the cover to physically and metaphorically desaturate the referents of trauma and ruin. Sarkissian’s ongoing engagement with Armenia has produced two further series of work, both focus ing on Yerevan, the capital. Underground (2009) is a series of sixteen photographs depicting different underground metro stations in the city. Constructed in the Soviet era these spaces display a certain stately elegance and inexplicable poignancy and are a con tinuing source of pride for the city’s inhabitants. As Sarkissian notes, “Despite the collapse of the Soviet system two decades before, these spaces have become a symbol of a past which encompassed power and prosperity. In addition they embody a shelter, keep ing people away from the new corrupt and unreliable system outside.”10 For Sarkissian, who inherited a powerful longing for the homeland from his ancestors, it is paradoxical to observe how local inhabitants
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8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 ibid.
Untitled, 2007 Archival inkjet print 120 × 175 cm From the series ‘In Between’ (2007)
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constantly seek the past in the present because of their own sense of alienation from their homeland due to Armenia’s dire contemporary situation. Despite the fact that these monumental structures were built by humans for human use, Sarkissian chooses to omit the figure from his frame. The photographs show the archways, corridors and stairwells of the metro system totally devoid of human presence. Empty, the spaces come to resemble mausolea. Captured using only ambient light—a strategy Sarkissian frequently uses—these eerie images depict long passages to nowhere. Sarkissian shot these images with the help of the Armenian police who held the public back behind barriers, and the knowledge of these invisible masses hovering just outside the frame enriches the work. These people, for whom these monuments are impor tant reminders of a past and a source of comfort in the present, remain unseen and invisible. Produced a year leater, City Fabric (2010) was inspired by the rapid transformation, over the last decade or so, of Yerevan’s city centre at the hands of real estate developers. As Sarkissian observes, “The
intention has been to build a modern city that could be the universal centre and a pole of attraction for the Armenians of the Diaspora. Existing residential houses, most of which dated from the late nineteenth century, have been completely demolished and replaced with new luxury buildings, in the hope that the people from the Diaspora would be interested in acquiring a prop erty to fulfil their dream of an Armenian ‘homeland’. Unexpectedly, or perhaps not that unexpectedly, most of the apartments remain unsold, and in some cases even unfinished.”11 City authorities, or the developers themselves, choose to conceal the facades of these newly built ruins with large fabric covers decorated with images of the buildings as they were envisioned. Sarkissian’s City Fabric simply documents these fabric monuments to a ghost-like urban existence, these screens bearing images promising the future that shield from view the collapse of that very vision. In the Background Background (2013), Sarkissian’s most recent work, documents six studio photography backgrounds from
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11 ibid.
Underground, 2009 Archival inkjet print 125 × 160 cm
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various cities across the Middle East: Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, Byblos, Cairo, and Istanbul.12 Like many of Sarkissian’s projects, the source of this series is personal, linked to his immediate family history and the origin of his interest in photography. Sarkissian spent much of his free time during childhood appren ticing at his father’s photography studio and laboratory in Damascus. Contemplation of his indi vidual and familial relationship to photography led Sarkissian to document the premises of his father’s business. These interiors were shot simply and straightforwardly using available light. As a studio photographer, Sarkissian’s father never used theatrical backgrounds, preferring instead to use plain backdrops, isolating his sitters against uninter rupted voids. Using only light to modulate the plain backdrops, his portraits strove not to construct narratives but to capture the sitter’s pure presence (in the eyes of the photographer). This purity was subsequently manipulated by manual retouches aimed at achieving certain pre-determined and desired tones, contrasts and contours.
Sarkissian’s photographs of his father’s studio and laboratory both memorialise the physical spaces from where his artistic practice emerged and docu ment the primary father-son dynamic as embodied in the inanimate space and materiality of the studio. Unlit and without sitters, these backdrops—white and blue—are photographed out of action, simply showing the real environment. However, this omission serves as an analogy for the impending death of a particular genre and practice of studio photography, threatened with obsolescence by the growing spread and popularity of digital photography. On a symbolic level, this obsolescence also indexes the mortality of a pioneering generation of photographers in the Middle East. Such an enquiry may be, consciously or sub consciously, infused with Oedipal tensions, fantasies and wish fulfilments. This dual departure point imbues Background with an inconspicuous but subtle intimacy, extricating it from the realm of pure documentary. In Background the studio backdrops presented, are both the object of study and the conveyor of meaning. Unlike those Sarkissian photographed in
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12 Though Sarkissian did intend to document studios in Aleppo, Damascus and other Syrian cities the ongoing civil conflict made travelling there impossible.
City Fabric, 2010
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his father’s studio, these six studios are theatrical spaces—some flamboyant, others simple—animated with painted or printed trompe l’oeil scenic backdrops, related props and furniture, and signifying objects. Spatial and temporal specificities are indicated through constructed and manipulated illusory devices. Animated through lighting, these theatrical settings transport the sitter into a desired, albeit fantasy world. Though each depicts a distinct, unique locale, the six images are grouped together as a single work; any overt reference to specific location is carefully omitted. A pair of short, fluted, ionic columns appear against a sky blue paper backdrop in the first image; one can imagine a couple leaning languorously against the columns, an elbow resting on each capital. These fetishistic columns evoke a classical theme underlining a barely sublimated Europhilia. In the second a metal bench sits in front of a tall wall of plastic hedging which forms a backdrop behind a disparate group of hanging and standing potted, plastic plants. A diminu tive plastic sculpture of a boy drawing water out of a well stands in a corner. The incongruent juxtaposition
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Background, 2013 Six duratrans prints 180 × 227 cm
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of indoor and outdoor plants exaggerates the already obvious artificiality of this paysage, which blends agrarian romanticism together with suburban domesticity. The third transports us to a tranquil seaside; a yellow sandy beach stretches obliquely across the canvas, the view filled with palm trees and islands, in a calm sea. A wet suit hangs to one side of the scene. The fourth manufactures a domestic scene dominated by an imitation grand piano in the foreground and what appear to be several spare scenic backdrops, hung at different angles for other occasions, in the background. The fifth depicts a background that mimics a storeroom full of books; a pile of clumsily stacked hardcovers, possibly not real books but plaster casts, rises up to a central peak that just touches the ceiling. Scattered in the foreground are a tall étagère with more books, a short column of books on the floor, and a pair of stools. The sixth shows a lone high backed neo-colonial chair standing against a soft rosy pink background. Sarkissian’s images of these studio sets expand the photograph’s visual frame beyond the intended limits
opposite and overleaf Background, 2013 Six duratrans prints 180 × 227 cm
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of the artificial sets, revealing the banal reality found just outside these fantasy worlds. Transgressing the prescribed boundaries of the backdrop, Sarkissian reveals details of the interiors—like the photographers’ equipment and lighting rigs—that these backdrops inhabit. His framing reveals the artifice of the theatrical device, undoing the manipulative contrivances of the fictive medium, functioning like a Brechtian distanciation, or Verfremdungseffekt 13, between the (absent) sitters as actors and the viewer as audience. Sarkissian distances the viewer from the relational, fabricated specificities of the sitter and the staging in order to isolate and highlight a closerto-the-real contemplation of the phenomenon. The reality and alienation effect asserts the truth about the mechanics of studio photography, inverting the semiotics of its theatre and the nature of desire inherent in its contrivance. The absence or intentional omission of a sitter enhances this deconstruction of meaning,laying bare the true reality of the background. The viewer is forced to contemplate the reality of the background and his own relationship to that reality.
Contemplating the Act of Witnessing
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13 Bertolt Brecht in Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willett (ed. & trans.), Hill and Wang, New York, 1964, p. 91.
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Sarkissian’s intentional inversion and deconstruc tion of the staging proposes a crisis of reference whereby the act of viewing is negotiated across multifarious and interchangeable contractual positions between the sitter, photographer and observer. Both through and beyond this negotiation, he simultane ously highlights and disrupts the necessary complicity between the sitter and the viewer. Ordinarily, the sitter and viewer mutually agree to a momentary suspension of disbelief, facilitated through the gaze of the photographer and the photographic apparatus. Disrupting this transaction inhibits the functionality of the device. Once deconstructed, Sarkissian recon structs the studio background as an object of study by displaying each of the photographs in the series likea theatrical backdrop itself. Backlit, each of the six photographs is presented unframed and is allowed to hang loose. The backlighting re-animates them as theatrical backdrops in their own right, preserving and re-presenting the depicted site and photographic image as a lone background, in the absence of a sitter.
The absence of a sitter once again dismantles the functionality of these photographic displays as backgrounds. Confronting the phenomenon of viewing on several levels, the viewer is obliged to decipher the meaning of both the photograph and the phenomenon it depicts, through, and in spite of, the intentional act of the sitter’s omission. The dialectic of presence and absence at play in these images and, arguably, in much of Sarkissian’s previous work, becomes a staging of death, alluding to various distinct but related narratives of decline that extend across the personal and the historical, from the disappearance of studio photography as an art form, exemplified by the near closure of his father’s studio, to the imminent collapse of a historical era, reflected in Syria’s grave contemporary state. This essay is a revised and expanded version of an earlier article on the photographs of Hrair Sarkissian.14
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14 Vali Mahlouji, ‘The Act of Witnessing: Hrair Sarkissian,’ Canvas, vol. 8, no. 4, July/August 2012, pp. 90–97.
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Background for Background
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Hrair Sarkissian, Sarkissian Photo Center, 2010
Hrair Sarkissian, Study for Background, Byblos, 2012
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Antranik Anouchian, Studio Portrait, Tripoli, Lebanon, date unknown
Harout Dirmakarjian, Studio Harout on Kouatly Street, Aleppo, Syria, 1960
Jules Lind, Farida, Beirut, Lebanon, 1890
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Hrair Sarkissian, Study for Background, Amman, 2012
56 Agop Kuyumjian/Photo Jack, Studio Photography, Tripoli, Lebanon, 1950s
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Bedros Doumanian, Studio Portrait, Amman, Jordan, 1940s
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Alban, King Farouk I of Egypt, Cairo, Egypt, 1943
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59 Anonymous, Najib Bey, Amman, Jordan, 1926
60 Hrair Sarkissian, Study for Background, Istanbul, 2012
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Said Jureidini, Man in Oriental Clothing, Beirut, Lebanon, date unknown
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76–77 Hrair Sarkissian, Study for Background, Byblos, 2012
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Van Leo, Self Portrait, Cairo, Egypt, 1940
Strommeyer & Heymann, Said Ahmad Shoukri, Cairo, Egypt, 1885
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Said Jureidini, Woman in Chinese Traditional Clothing, Beirut, Lebanon, 1895
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Anonymous, From the left: Zalikha Dajani, Wafika Dajani, Rabiha Dajani, Fadila Dajani, Samir Lababidi, Muhamad Dajani, and Nabil Mrad, Beirut, Lebanon, 1945/6
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A.D. Reiser, European Traditional Clothing, Alexandria, Egypt, 1890s
Selim Abu Izzeddin, Wadad Abu Izzeddin, Abadieh, Lebanon, 1900
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Khalil Raad, Tourists Dressed Up in Traditional Clothing, Jerusalem, Palestine, 1910
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Anonymous, From the left: Fouad el Khoury and Sami el Khoury, Lebanon, 1910s
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90 G. Lekegian & Co., “Tableau Vivant,” Garden City, Cairo, Egypt, 1924/25
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93 Garbis Nazaristissian, Studio Photography, Alexandria, Egypt, 1953
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Hrair Sarkissian in conversation with Murtaza Vali
Essay
Photographing Disappearance
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Hrair Sarkissian
Murtaza Vali You have shot many different public structures— city squares, metro stations, unfinished buildings andconstruction sites—in your various photographic series. But you always choose to present these spaces, normally packed with people, as eerily empty, often portraying the city as a post-apocalyptic ghost town. For Underground (2009), shot in Yerevan’s metro system, you even collaborated with the local police to ensure that the spaces remained empty while you were photographing them. Why do you prefer not to include people in your images?
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Hrair Sarkissian In each of these series, I was drawn to the particular public space because there was a related concept I was interested in investigating. In Execution Squares (2008) I took photographs of public squares in three Syrian cities where executions still take place regularly. I shot them around the time the executions usually occur, in the early morning, using just available natural light. That is what gives them that soft, calm feel. But though they
look like empty intersections initially, our imaginations, once primed with the additional information provided by the series title, project all sorts of macabre details into the lingering absences. In Istory (2011), a series of photographs I took of various semi-private and public libraries and archives in Istanbul, I was interested in staging a confrontation between two contradictory narratives, Turkey’s official historical account of the Armenian genocide, which does not acknowledge it as history, and that of my grandparents, who were forced to flee Eastern Anatolia for Syria in 1915. Again, I only used available light, which was limited in this case, and in the resulting images the spaces feel claustrophobic and inaccessible, just like the history buried deep in the files they house. Including people in either of these series would have introduced a totally different dimension. Human presence can be overbearing at times, distracting the viewer and stealing attention away from the specific qualities and attractions of spaces and places.
This strategy of emptying out does focus the viewer’s attention on the background, the setting, the context.
Underground, 2009 Archival inkjet print 125 Ă— 160 cm each
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But the emptiness you capture is often uncanny; the void is invisible but remains palpable. Though the figure is absent its absence paradoxÂiÂcally suggests a presence; the figure turns into a ghost. This approach seems particularly well suited to addressing trauma without representing actual atrocity. Is the representation of trauma something you are interested in?
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I would say trauma is not merely something I am interested in artistically and intellectually but is something I have to live with. The memory of the atrocities endured by my grandparents has been passed down to subsequent generations; the more I became aware of these atrocities, the more of a burden they became for me, impossible to shake off completely. They became ghostly, haunting me endlessly. I try to use photography to make tangible the relationship between these ghosts and myself, to reconcile with the past so as not to remain endlessly trapped there. But, ultimately, there is no real way out and photography is one tool to deal with the trauma and its consequences. It allows
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me to give trauma, usually invisible and intangible, a clearly visible and legible form.
Yes it is. Actually, I always consciously withhold, trying hard not to give everything away. I am not interested in simply pointing out what is there, what is evident. By excluding judgement and introducing an air of mystery through a degree of obscurity, I hope to entice the viewer to go deeper into the image, to wander around inside rather than merely skim the surface. The viewer’s imagination can really open the work up, leading to wholly unexpected interpretations, widening even my perspective by drawing my attention to details I may have missed initially.
Execution Squares, 2008 Lambda print 125 × 160 cm each
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This approach also seems to challenge the document ary function traditionally assigned to photography. You use photography not to capture a slice of reality but to create a space that activates the viewer’s imagination. Is this a fair judgement of your approach to photography?
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top Istory, 2011 Archival inkjet print 190 Ă— 150 cm
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bottom Istory, 2011 Archival inkjet print 150 Ă— 190 cm
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The idea for the project came from a simple, straightforward photograph I took in my father’s studio two years ago, an image of one of the backdrops there. Before he became a photographer my father worked as a car mechanic in Aleppo. His clothes were always covered in grease and grime, and my grandmother would never allow him to join the family at the table during lunch. Instead he was made to sit and eat alone, in a corner of the courtyard of their house. My father gradually grew tired of always being excluded and finally decided to take up a cleaner profession: photography. He moved down to Damascus and learned the tricks of the trade from another Armenian photographer named Dikran. Along with some other photographers, he eventually opened a full service studio in the centre of Damascus that specialised in portrait and wedding photography alongside developing, processing and printing. In 1979, he established the first colour photography laboratory in Syria; he called it ‘Dream
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What is the origin of Background (2013), a project that documents the interiors of photography studios, and specifically studio backdrops, across the Middle East?
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Color’ because it represented the fulfilment of a long held dream. Later, in the 1980s, due to a crop of new Arabisation rules, the name was changed to ‘Sarkissian Photo Center'. I loved that place. It is where my love of photography was born and nurtured. Recently, my father decided to close his shop. This little bit of autobiography, the impending closure of my father’s photography laboratory and the family business, seemed to coincide with a broader disappearance of a particular type of backdrop from commercial studios across the Middle East. This disappearance seemed to me to index the end of an era in the history of photography in the region and was worth documenting somehow.
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How did you go about doing your research? Which cities did you visit and why did you select these specific cities? Was it because they are simply the major urban centres in the region? Or were they key centres for the development of photography? I took photographs in Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, Byblos, Cairo and Istanbul. All these cities were
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important centres for the development of photography in the region throughout the twentieth century. When the Ottoman Empire ended, most of the photographers, many of whom were previously itinerant, chose to settle in such major cities and so they were the obvious starting points for my research. Of course, I would have loved to have included Damascus and, maybe some other Syrian cities in this project, but the continuing crisis there made that impossible.
I didn’t have a specific plan. All I knew was that studios that specialise in portraiture, and especially those that used the old style backgrounds, were onthe verge of disappearing. The spread of digital photography, and the possibility of quickly and cheaply manipulating backgrounds digitally via Photoshop, was slowly killing their business. So, I wandered around each city, stopping in studios, asking folks about who might still be using the types of backdrops I was looking for. I was specifically hoping to locate studios that still
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How did you select the specific studios?
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used hand-painted backdrops, of scenery and settings, large-scale landscape images of German forests, Swiss mountains and French palaces, or stylised interiors like Bedouin tents and train stations, or simple decorative settings with props and accessories like columns and swings.
Hrair Sarkissian
What was the oldest studio you visited? And the one with the craziest backdrops?
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The oldest studios I visited were in Istanbul and Cairo. Both were roughly from my father’s generation, from the classic portrait photography school, the sort of photographers who only used lighting to colour the background in their studio, never a painted backdrop or any other type of decoration. In these spaces I only found plain white backdrops, or simply a painted white wall. But the rooms of their studios were filled with portraits of famous local celebrities, of actors and singers, and I could still smell the old chemicals. They looked and felt like museums to me. Amman had the craziest backdrops; in one studio you could have yourself photographed in a lush German
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Research Photograph, 2012
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forest or an exotic Bedouin tent, by the seashore or in a train station, in a book-filled private library or the setting of a classic film. This near instantaneous, implied movement, between places that were so temporally and spatially disjunctive, felt a bit crazy and disorienting.
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What drew you to the backdrops specifically?
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The idea that a particular practice of studio portraiture, instrumental in the development of photography in the Middle East, was dying out due to the growing reliance, amongst both practitioners and patrons, on digital technologies. While these backdrops were all about fantasy and make believe there was a theatrical and material truth to them. In contrast, portraits produced using digital technologies feel categorically false; they stifle our imaginations.
You shot hundreds of backdrops during your research trips to the various cities. What criteria did you use to select the final six images?
I tried to select final images that I thought were most evocative of the specific character of each city. Of course, this selection was highly subjective, and I consciously chose not to make the link between a photograph and a city obvious or explicit, which would, in a way, reduce the project to mere documentary. There was a wholly unexpected similarity in many of the photographs I shot, especially when it came to a particular type of painted backdrop that I encountered in every city I visited. Most of these were imported from China and held little that was specific or familiar to what I knew about the city and its inhabitants. Unfortunately, in many cases, the locally made backdrops were often destroyed because storing them long term meant wasting valuable studio space.
You have developed a very specific display strategy for these images. Can you describe how they will be displayed and what your reasons for displaying them this way are? The images are printed in a large format, and will hang, loose, a short distance from the wall. They will be lit
Research Photograph, 2012
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Research Photograph, 2012
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The tragic history of the Armenian people, the genocide and the subsequent scattering of their community, is an important subtext in much of your previous work. Was it a concern in this project, especially given that Armenians were photographic pioneers across the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, often setting up the first and best known studios in many different cities? At first, I did consider focusing on studios owned and run by Armenians, who, as you say, did play a key part in the history of photography in the region. However, once I began my research I quickly realised that there were hardly any Armenian studios left, and, so, I broadened my approach. What I was finally most interested in was
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from behind using fluorescent lights. I wanted to recreate the way the old backgrounds were mounted and used. By not sealing the images within a structure or frame I am hoping to make them come alive; if I had simply shown them enclosed as light boxes it would have felt akin to placing them in a coffin.
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above and opposite Research Photograph, 2012
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marking the disappearance of these backdrops and the particular type of studio photography associated with them, regardless of the background of the photographers themselves.
Perhaps. It is clearly about a certain tradition of studio photography and the generation of photographers who practiced it and, for those informed about this history, it might serve as some sort of memorial. Though digital photography might have the potential for endless manipulation and the creation of infinite variations, the art and skill needed to take photographs in the past will never be fully replaced. It will continue to haunt these backdrops and the spaces that house them. Hopefully, my photographs capture that to some extent.
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Could this project be thought of as a memorial of sorts to these pioneers, some of whose efforts are being archived and documented for posterity but many others who are quickly being lost to oblivion?
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Hrair Sarkissian Born 1973 Damascus, Syria Lives and works in London, U.K. EDUCATION 2010 BFA, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, the Netherlands SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2013 Darat al Funun–The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan 2011 Modern Essays 2: Istory, SALT Beyog ˘lu, Istanbul, Turkey Hrair Sarkissian, Podbielski Contemporary, Berlin, Germany 2010 Underground, Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Greece Execution Squares, PhotoBiennale 2010/21st International Photography Meeting, Genti Koule, Thessaloniki, Greece 2008 Unfinished, Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Greece 2007 Unfinished, Kalfayan Galleries, Thessaloniki, Greece 1998 French Institute for Arab Studies, Damascus, Syria SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2013 Ici, ailleurs, Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille, France Paisajes 1969–2013, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico Power! Photos! Freedom!, FoMuFotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium 2012 Encounter: The Royal Academy in the Middle East, Katara, Doha, Qatar
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0–Now: Traversing West Asia, 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7), various venues, Brisbane, Australia Double Take: 2nd Mardin Biennial, Mardin, Turkey Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A. Drift: An Exploration of Urban & Suburban Landscapes, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E. 2011 Facing Mirrors, Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki, Greece A Rock and a Hard Place: 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece Out of Place, Tate Modern, London, U.K.; Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan Plot for a Biennial: Sharjah Biennial 10, various venues, Sharjah, U.A.E. 2010 Breaking News: Contemporary Photography from the Middle East and Africa, Ex Ospedale Sant’Agostino, Modena, Italy Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities, Manarat A1 Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. What Keeps Mankind Alive? The 11th International Istanbul Biennial, various venues, Istanbul, Turkey 2009 Treasures of Wisdom, ReMap 2, various venues, Athens, Greece 2008 And now? Visual Arts in Greece III, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece
New Ends, Old Beginnings, The Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, U.K. Constructio, Galeria Antonio De Barnola, Barcelona, Spain 2007 Terres de Rêves, Association ECUME, Seville, Spain 2005 Meeting Points 4, various venues, Amman, Jordan; Damascus, Syria 2004 Voices Off, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, Arles, France 2003 Les journées de la photographie, various venues, Damascus, Syria Hrair Sarkissian, Centre d’Art Contemporain le Creux de l’enfer, Thiers, France 2002 Les journées de la photographie, various venues, Damascus, Syria 2001 Les journées de la photographie, various venues, Damascus, Syria International Photography Gathering, various venues, Aleppo, Syria 2000 International Photography Gathering, various venues, Aleppo, Syria EXHIBITION CATALOGUES AND BOOKS 2011 Out of Place. Tate Modern, London; Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman. Saadawi, Ghalya (ed.), Plot for a Biennial: Sharjah Biennial 10. Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah.
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2010 Ioakimidis, Vangelis (ed.), Topos: PhotoBiennale 2010/21st International Photography Meeting. Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki. Maggia, Filippo (ed.), Breaking News: Contemporary Photography from the Middle East and Africa. Skira, Milan; Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Modena. Lazzarini, Francesca (ed.), Are You a Lucky Artist? Skira, Milan. 2009 Petrinou, Christina (ed.), And now? Visual Arts in Greece III. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Sloman, Paul (ed.), Contemporary Art in the Middle East. Black Dog Publishing, London. What, How & for Whom and ˙I lkay Baliç (eds), 11th International Istanbul Biennial: What Keeps Mankind Alive? Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Istanbul. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2012 Ertür. Bas¸ak ‘Plenty of History’. Manifesta Journal, no. 15, pp. 18-20. Mahlouji, Vali ‘The Act of Witnessing: Hrair Sarkissian’. Canvas, vol. 8, no. 4, July/August, pp. 90-97. 2011 Battista, Kathy ‘Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial’. Art Monthly, no. 346, May, pp. 30-31. Hughes, Isabella Ellaheh ‘Sharjah Biennial 10: Plot for a Biennial’. ArtAsiaPacific, no. 73, May/June, pp. 134-135. Jang, Hyejin and Jaeyong Park ‘10th Sharjah Biennial: Plot as a Storyline or Conspiracy for the Biennial’. art in Asia, March/April, pp. 96-101.
Mamou, Regina ‘Syria’. ArtAsiaPacific Almanac, no. 6, p. 183. Muller, Nat ‘Hrair Sarkissian’. Metropolis M, no. 4, August/ September, pp. 42-43. Piatti, Elisabetta ‘Hrair Sarkissian’. ZOOM, no. 104, October, pp. 64-67. 2010 Ackley, Brian ‘Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities’. Bidoun, no. 20, Spring, p. 138. Amodeo, Fabio ‘Breaking News. Africa e Medio Oriente descrivono se stessi’. Arte, no. 448, December, p. 35. Ersoy, Özge ‘On the 11th Istanbul Biennial’. ararat, June 25, http://araratmagazine.org/2010/06/11th-istanbul-biennial/. Luppi, Stefano ‘Ultime notizie da Africa e Medio Oriente’. Giornale dell’Arte, vol. 28, no. 303, November, p. 75. Mack, Joshua ‘Disorientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities’. ArtReview, no. 42, p. 153. Paynter, November ‘Hrair Sarkissian: On Construction and Churches’. RES: Art World/World Art, no. 6, November, pp. 20-28. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen ‘Hrair Sarkissian: Dream Color’. Bidoun, no. 23, Winter, pp. 30-31. Winklbauer, Andrea ‘Die 11. Istanbul Biennale’. Eikon, no. 69, pp. 49-51.
2008 Abravanel, Nelly ‘Light and shadow in deserted places’. I Kathimerini, March 27. Gau, Sønke ‘In-Between Times and In-Between Spaces’. Camera Austria International, no. 102, Summer, pp. 43-48. ‘Unfinished at Kalfayan Galleries’. Time Out Athens, February 27. 2007 ‘Unfinished…’. Ta Nea, May 12. ‘Unfinished by Hrair Sarkissian’. O Kosmos tou Ependiti, May 5.
2009 Bader, Joerg ‘¿Qué mantiene viva a la humanidad?/What Keeps Humanity Alive?’. Lapiz, vol. 28, no. 257, November, pp. 76-81. Esche, Charles ‘Best of 2009: 11th International Istanbul Biennial’. Artforum, vol. 48, no. 4, December, pp. 196-199. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen ‘Arguing the World’. The National, November 19, pp. 6-7.
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ex tr a Writer's Biography Vali Mahlouji is a London-based independent curator, art advisor, writer and translator, who trained first in archaeology and philology and then as a psychoanalyst. He is a curatorial adviser to the British Museum on its modern/contemporary Iranian collections and educational programme, curator and producer of Perspectives on the Shiraz Arts Festival at Yale University, and guest editor of an upcoming issue of Theater, the Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre’s journal. In 2008 he was curator and associate producer of Iran: New Voices at the Barbican Arts Centre, London. Mahlouji has collaborated with: Asia Society Museum, New York (2013); Sharjah Biennial (2011); National Museum of Contemporary Arts Athens (2009); Musée du Quai Branly, Paris (2012); Delfina Foundation, London (2011/10); Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna (2011); Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris (2011/10/09); Niccolo Sprovieri Gallery, London (2011); Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2012/11/10); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2012); Kalfayan Galleries, Athens (2011); Saatchi Gallery, London (2010); The London Middle East Institute; City University of New York; British Film Institute; London Film School; Institut Francais; Channel 4; BBC; Canvas; and The Guardian. His translations for theatre have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre and Barbican Arts Centre, London, Theatre de la Bastille and La Colline, Paris, the Dublin Theatre Festival, and broadcast by the BBC. As opera designer he has recently been in residence with Bregenzer Festspiele (2011) and Grange Park Opera, Alresford (2008-10), and his work has appeared at Sadler’s Wells, Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Arcola Theatre, all in London.
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Acknowledgements Hrair would like to thank: Arab Image Foundation, Raffy Avakian, Vartan Avakian, Sibil Çekmen, Color Consulting Group, Darat Al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Kalfayan Galleries, Vali Mahlouji, Ehab Micheal, Liam Tickner, Eline van der vlist, Raed Yassin, and all the studio owners who allowed me to photograph their spaces.
Murtaza would like to thank: Laura Egerton, the heart and engine of the Abraaj Group Art Prize, without whose good humour and tireless effort the realisation of this book, and the exhibition it accompanies, would have been impossible; my collaborator Hrair Sarkissian for generously sharing his time and work; Vali Mahlouji for his thoughtful essay situating Background within Hrair’s extensive oeuvre; Savita Apte, Chair of the Selection Committee, Abraaj Group Art Prize, Fréderic Sicre, Partner, Abraaj Group, Antonia Carver, Director, Art Dubai, and the rest of the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize Selection Committee: Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng and Julia Peyton-Jones; Adam Michaels, Kim Sutherland, Prem Krishnamurthy, Aileen Kwun and Won Choi of Project Projects for their flexibility and patience and for their elegant yet playful ddesigns for the publication and exhibition; Yuli Karatsiki, Michalis Kyriakidis, Danae Kaplanidi and Vicki Politis at Kalfayan Galleries; Ralph Nashawaty and Walid Sader at Arab Image Foundation; Jaret Vadera for his constant, warm and thoughtful support; Sipokazi Cetu-Quick for her invaluable assistance with childcare; my partner Uzma Rizvi, who gracefully and silently bore the burden of my half of our life together during the months I dedicated to this project; my daughter, Zainab Sophia, whose joyful presence provided both much needed distractions and reality checks; and, finally, my family, Shakir, Nargis and Fatema Vali, and Hussain Kutiyanawala, for grieving and persevering with me. This book is dedicated to my brother Mustafa, who left us too soon but taught me the simple wisdom of always dreaming beyond. 117
ex tr a Photography Credits Listed by page number: 24, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 98, 99, 100, 102: Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki; 40, 43, 44: Courtesy the artist and The Abraaj Group Art Prize; 50/51, 54/55, 58, 60, 64, 66-68, 70/71, 75-77, 79, 82/83, 86, 89, 91, 92, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113: Courtesy the artist; 52/53, 84: Collection AIF, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 56, 59: Collection AIF/Yammine, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 57: Collection AIF/Mikaelian, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 61, 73: Collection AUC/Van Leo, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 62, 63: Collection AIF/Sursock, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 65: Collection AIF/Abu Izzeddin, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 69, 74, 87, 88: Collection AIF/el Khoury, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 72: Collection AIF/Doumanian, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 78: Collection AIF/Rachid, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 80/81: Collection AIF/Dajani, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 85: Collection AIF/Hajj, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 90: Collection AIF/Younes, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation; 93: Collection AIF/Studio Roy, Copyright © Arab Image Foundation.
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extra|ordinary is published on the occasion of The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, exhibition at Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, March 20-23, 2013. Copyright © 2013. The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, Murtaza Vali (Curator), and the Artists. Texts. Copyright © 2013. Murtaza Vali (Editor) and the Authors. All works by Vartan Avakian, Iman Issa, Huma Mulji, Hrair Sarkissian, and Rayyane Tabet. Copyright © 2013. The Artists. © The photographs in this publication have been provided by the artists whose work is represented and The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Exceptions are indicated directly in the image captions/photo credits. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from The Abraaj Group Art Prize and the respective authors. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made we ask copyright holders to contact the publishers. ISBN: 978-9948-444-77-0 Editor: Murtaza Vali Essays: Haig Aivazian, Adnan Madani, Vali Mahlouji, Nat Muller, Walid Sadek, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Interviews: Murtaza Vali Editorial advisor on behalf of Abraaj: Laura Egerton Copyediting: Murtaza Vali Proofreading: Murtaza Vali, Laura Egerton Book design: Project Projects, New York Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai Typeset in Executive and Arnhem