The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Everyone in my generation is wearing frost now. Snow falls early. Even with the sun still smoldering my generation tills ice, ploughs snow and furrows stones. Everyone in my generation wears frost. It has been unseasonably cold. 1 Hrair Sarkissian’s photographs combine characteristics of the documentary genre with an elegiac account of lived experience. They foreground the historical, religious and social forces that govern our memories of the built environment, emphasising the strong emotional and cultural ties to place. In his series ‘In Between’ 2007, signposts of contemporary Armenia and its post-Soviet legacy appear to be disappearing under snow. This majestic white layering obscures our vision, preventing us from observing, with any clarity, what lies beneath. The snow conceals the harsh realities of modern life in Armenia — it is a silent, fragile membrane that, in a moment of standstill, reveals images of the present while concealing its subject. Sarkissian’s images are populated by abandoned structures and locations devoid of human presence. Yet, these sites are coded with social significance; their precise emptiness is emblematic of the traumatic histories lying beneath the surface or lurking just out of sight. In these works — including the recent series ‘City Fabric’ 2010 and ‘Underground’ 2009 — Sarkissian connects the image of an abandoned and empty space to Armenia’s turbulent modern history, both before and after the fall of Communism. 2 Landlocked by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran, the predominantly Christian country has experienced a long and difficult history. During the 1915 Armenian genocide, committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, millions were killed and displaced, producing one of the world’s largest international diasporas. In 1991, Armenia became the first non-Baltic state to gain independence from the Soviet Union, an event causing further displacement for Armenians, as well as interrelated problems of economic hardship and conflict with the bordering territories of Azerbaijan and Turkey. The concept of diaspora figures prominently in Sarkissian’s practice, and it is a concept that binds people — through shared experiences and memories — who have survived and been displaced by catastrophe. Like many of his generation who were born in the diaspora to Armenian parents, Sarkissian’s cultural heritage has been characterised by the desire to return to a self-assured and proud mother country. The reality involved a country still undergoing a process of recovery from crippling Soviet rule, combined with the effects of regional conflict and environmental disaster. Visiting Armenia for the first time as an adult, Sarkissian was unable to conceptualise the idea of his homeland without experiencing a sense of emptiness and abandonment: I was unable to link the two countries: the mythical homeland and post-Soviet Armenia. The irreconcilable fissures were too many. Just as the former collapsed, in my mind’s eye I constructed a new, sobering geography where what I thought I knew about a place, along with my prior sense of belonging to it, got displaced. 3 The series ‘In Between’ presents the ruins of Soviet-era hotel complexes abandoned in the process of construction following Armenian independence. Once a mecca for Russian tourists, the landscape now bears the visual traces of economic desertion. The metropolitan centre of the Armenian capital Yerevan — one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities — appears dwarfed by the immense whiteness. Here, emptiness is a shared experience. Mount Ararat, the symbolic site for Armenian national identity, seems to be a spectre smothered in fog, a salient reminder that the area remains within the borders of modern-day Turkey, under restricted access. Signs of a militarised presence are reminders of the ongoing hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan, while in Haghtanak (Victory) Park, the surreal view of a Ferris wheel together with a S-75 Soviet missile ensures the monumental statue of Mother Armenia remains just out of view. As lands disappear in Sarkissian’s photographs, so too does our sense of the familiar. Memories are displaced, overwritten, and we become acutely aware of the state of being in-between — between time and space, between lived experience and second-hand memory. Hrair Sarkissian’s photographs point to a delicacy of place and the search for a past in the present. Perhaps when the snow thaws what might remain is the frost — generations carrying the burdens of the past. José Da Silva 1 This English translation of Maro Markaryan’s poem ‘My Generation’ was published in the Armenian General Benevolent Union of America’s journal Ararat ; see vol.26, no.1, 1985, p.111. 2 City Fabric 2010 documents the luxury apartment construction projects that have transformed the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Designed to lure Armenians from the diaspora back to a modernised city centre, Sarkissian’s series emphasises the ghostly banners that mask the otherwise uninhabited apartments. Underground 2009 features images of the former Soviet Metro system in Yerevan. Even while the structures are heavily decorated and adorned with Soviet national symbols, the spaces have become a source of pride for the local inhabitants. 3 Hrair Sarkissian, artist statement, 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale , <www.biennale3.thessalonikibiennale.gr/en/artists/Hrair_ Sarkissian/>, viewed 10 August 2012. HRAIR SARKISSIAN Everyone wears frost 245