Image and text source: The Photographer’s Gallery website
The essay, written under the shadow of the unfolding genocide in Gaza and Ukraine, frames Sarkissian’s exhibited works Last Seen (2018-2021) and Deathscape (2020) as “re-presenting trauma as resonant after-image, tasking the viewer with imagining and bearing witness to unseen events…and the literal retrieval of lost bodies for reburial and rites of healing. The beginning of justice for the Disappeared, now made to reappear…”
“As history repeats its cycles of genocidal and epistemic violence, the work of Hrair Sarkissian seems every more pressing. Prescient and nearly proleptic, it anticipates the historical condition we will face yet again. Here is a restitutive form of justice through image, re-writing histories of political violence by making visible the forgotten and unseen. An affective politics of photography making evident the still radical possibilities of the medium A collective solidarity of seeing bearing witness to what we can bear….”
“...[O}ne way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned , and whose lies are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others - even it it means taking those latter lives.”
Catalog available here.