Hrair Sarkissian’s Atlas of Restored Images

Climbing the steps of 93 Mortimer Street in London, I entered Ibraaz’s Majlis or ‘gathering room’ in English. Pushing through a heavy white door, I stepped into what indeed felt like a very special kind of gathering. Forty-eight navy blue plinths emerged from darkness, each made visible by thin bands of light radiating from their base and crown. There was something solemn in this presentation, a quiet gravity, as though something momentous was unfolding.

Hrair Sarkissian’s Stolen Past adopts a minimal infrastructure: plinth, light and thin translucent panel. Repeated 48 times, this gesture accumulates producing both effect and affect. Visitors move slowly between the structures, heads gently bowed, as if in deference, to discern the faint images of ceramic vessels, clay tablets, ancient figurines and fragments of pottery that surface.

Recurrence and iteration here is not redundancy but insistence and persistence. This serial presentation poses the question of the lives of the original objects but it is always left without resolution or closure. This photo-sculptural installation operates as a form of archival reconstruction: a shared act of remembrance, another mourning practice. Stolen Past contends with losses that are historical, ongoing, and politically produced. Here, it is not a body that is missing, but artefacts; and in response, Sarkissian has constructed a memorial, a space in which a eulogy might take place. Not any eulogy, but one charged with political stakes.

One of the earliest known examples of a public eulogy is Pericles’ ‘Funeral Oration’, delivered in 431 BC and recorded by Thucydides in History of the Peloponnesian War. It was not only a funerary speech, but an intellectual and political proposition. In it, the dead are honoured, yet their loss is immediately drawn into a collective narrative; grief is shaped, directed, made to serve the now. From then on, a eulogy did more than commemorate. It framed individual loss within a shared horizon. Here, the disappearance of artefacts expands outward: first the loss experienced by archaeologists, but also the loss borne by the communities of the Euphrates River in northern Syria, and, finally, more broadly, a transnational loss of centuries of arts and crafts. Post-disappearance praise, in this context, is not neutral; it reinforces political and ethical values, consolidating a sense of who ‘we’ are in the face of what has been taken. Over time, eulogies became more explicitly didactic. To praise the deceased is also to instruct the living, employing rhetoric to affectively address and bind a community through shared feeling and moral orientation. It is through this lens that I approach Stolen Past: as an address. One that situates itself against looting, against iconoclasm, against the instrumentalisation of religion as a political system. 

In pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, one of the most vital traditions was the Arabic rithāʾ (elegy), exemplified in the work of Al-Khansa (c. 575–645 CE). Her poems did not resolve grief; they sustained it. Mourning becomes a form of continuity: an affective archive in which the dead are kept present, active within the social and ethical life of the community. Stolen Past operates in a similar register. It performs – i.e shapes – its own affective archive, ensuring that these ‘dead’ vessels, tablets, figurines, and fragments persist within our consciousness. In this sense, Stolen Past is Sarkisian’s requiem to plundered history: a way of sustaining the fallen, the unaccounted and the effaced within a visual language made of photographic reproductions and circulations.

Stolen Past is also a spatial practice. The sheer number of plinths that occupy the gallery, compels viewers to experience multitude. The installation insists on repetition, on replica, on fragmentation. If most monuments invite a distant, passive mode of looking, here the public is drawn into proximity: the image must be searched for, examined, gradually discerned. Recognition is slow, and with it comes a muted form of grief. The work proposes a monument-memory as an active ethical relation. 

There are no triumphal narratives here, nor the stabilising authority of state-centred or ideological commemoration. Stolen Past resists the monument’s demand for immediacy and permanence; instead, attention is drawn towards absence and loss. Notably, the word ‘monument’ derives from the Latin monumentum, from monere: to remind, to instruct, and to warn. We stand in intimate proximity, reminded, instructed, and definitely warned – but through a sense of fragility rather than assertion. At the memorial’s centre are backlit images rendered as 3D-printed lithophanes: thin translucent plaques that, when illuminated, resolve into something akin to black-and-white photographs. In Chinese ceramic practice, a related technique is known as àn huā (暗花), meaning ‘secret’ or ‘veiled decoration’. In both cases, revelation is inseparable from restraint. The artworks display, but they also protect; they withhold as much as they show, shielding the image from further damage. Sarkissian thus oscillates between demonstration and concealment. In addition the fragility of our material world, Sarkissian also invites us to consider time, and its possible extension. These artefacts travelled across centuries, yet it took seconds or minutes for their destruction to take place. By contrast, it took Sarkissian between 20 and 24 hours to reconstruct their likeness.

Founded in 1981, the Raqqa Museum once held thousands of artefacts ranging from prehistoric tools to medieval ceramics. Between 2013 and 2017, during the Islamic State’s occupation of the city, both the museum and its storehouses were systematically dismantled. Objects were destroyed or dispersed through global black markets, leaving only a fraction of the original collection intact. At its peak, the institution contained approximately 8,900 relics, drawn from archaeological excavations across the Al Balikh River basin and the Middle Euphrates Valley, including sites such as Tell Al-Sabi Abyad, Hammam al-Turkman, Mumbaqa, Hawija Halawa, Tell Al-Bay’a, Al-Rusafa, and Tell Khuwayra. Today, only around 880 objects remain, with roughly 40 on public display in Raqqa.

Following these events, the main challenge was that of documentation: no comprehensive inventory existed to allow for the identification of stolen objects should they resurface, and no documentation will ever exist for the antiquities irremediably damaged. The museum’s own records were fragmentary at best. Focus Raqqa 2.0, a transnational initiative for cultural heritage reconstruction and digital archiving established in 2017, now works to rebuild this missing database.1 Following that project and key players, Sarkissian, used mobile phone photographs, hastily taken by the Raqqa archaeological team and local residents as war began to unfold in Syria.

The Islamic State’s destruction of cultural heritage operated across multiple registers: from the looting of ancient sites for profit to the performative destruction of both modern and ancient monuments for politico-religious ends. In this economy of violence, the Raqqa Museum became more than a repository under threat. Its looting functioned simultaneously as a theological statement, propaganda instrument, revenue stream, and mechanism of internal control. Antiquities were thus transformed into instruments of war and state-making. 

Against such iconoclasm, Stolen Past proposes a form of testimonial realism, infused with reverie: a reinstatement by form, a return by shape, and a recovering of their historical weight. In doing so, Stolen Past resists both the finality of destruction and the false comfort of reconstruction, presenting instead a eulogy, a requiem, a memorial, and an atlas of restored images.