Luminous Absence: On Hrair Sarkissian’s Stolen Past

It is a solemn atmosphere: the darkened room sequenced with plinths emitting light, creating ephemeral halos that hold space for something beyond what we see. It is but the slightest gesture towards life, not quite extinguished. It is a luminous light radiating from within. Hrair Sarkissian’s artistic practice has perfected the presence of absence by intentionally structuring his oeuvre as an insistent and sustained inquiry into the spirit of that which has been rendered (often, violently) invisible. Within this epistemic framework, life is more than human, it is all that holds memory and affect, and the existence engendered by those modalities. Stolen Past invites the viewer to look into the soft light. Each plinth holds within it a three-dimensional lithophane (literally meaning stone-appearance, or showing/transparency) panel marked by sepia toned images of lost archaeological artefacts from the Raqqa Museum in Syria, appearing to the viewer only when light shines from underneath. 

There is a certain resilience that archaeological artefacts embody. Being covered for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, they become the custodians of meaning, time, and memory. Their exposure to air shifts the chemical compositions of their skin and they are rendered wise through their experience of transformation and deterioration. In that wisdom, they take on new meanings and enter into different relationships with the material contexts in which they are embedded, becoming elders possessing cultural knowledge and inherited forms. These elders, within Sarkissian’s re-presentation in Stolen Past, appear in a ghostly form as a trace of themselves.

These visions are spirits of forms that have been lost or removed from existence, and their resilience emerges in their insistence on being seen. Assisted by Sarkissian’s practice, these artefacts demand a witness to their erasure. What is illuminated is not merely an optical sensibility. Drawing from Chinese Buddhist practice, which Sarkissian refers to as an influence for his use of the form of the lithophane, such a presentation becomes the condition under which a concealed essence is made apparent.1 It is then that the recognition of the ontological (what these objects are) shifts to an epistemological consideration of the forms of knowledge they contain and enable.

Coded visually as memorial objects, these plinths present, in essence, a visual manifestation of bare life: objects stripped of social, political, and legal status and made vulnerable to forms of material violence. In this instance, bare life can be thought of as the irreducible presence of the living worlds contained within those archaeological artefacts, extrapolated and extended to include the people and culture of those whose history has been and continues to be erased. The viewer is invited to witness even when those worlds are politically and/or violently rendered invisible. It is that light of being (within a Buddhist conception) that illuminates the trace of a form and makes both the artefact/human and the violence of erasure legible. 

The artefacts we see marked on the lithophanes include a variety of different categories of things, including human and animal figurines, pots with incised animals (likely gazelles), ornate architectural fragments, cuneiform tablets, coins, metal clasps and hooks, and an array of other materials one might usually come across as part of an archaeological display. One can imagine the Raqqa Museum, a converted Ottoman building, to have galleries dedicated to various time periods and types of artefacts. As with the rest of the city of Raqqa, this museum also suffered as the Islamic State took control of the city in 2013 from Syrian opposition forces. By 2014, it was announced that Raqqa was to be the capital (caliphate) of the Islamic State. 

As the war unfolded, artefacts were quickly photographed by the museum staff prior to being looted and/or destroyed. These photographs were archived by the Syrian archaeologist Khaled Hiatlih of the Focus Raqqa Project, and it was Hiatlih who provided Sarkissian access to this archive for this series of works.2 The images from the archive served as the direct references for the lithophane prints. The future of these artefacts (and humans) was further complicated in 2017 (between 6 June and 17 October), when a US-led coalition worked to oust the Islamic State from Raqqa. According to Amnesty International, this effort ‘killed and injured thousands of civilians and destroyed much of the city. Homes, private and public buildings and infrastructure were reduced to rubble or damaged beyond repair.’3

This moment of US military euphoria of removing the Islamic State from power went hand in hand with the destruction of life, property, infrastructure, and history. This is not new in the history of American military action. There are historical analogues here with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the attendant looting of artefacts by different groups, which the US army failed to prevent, and which made their way to the antiquities market.4 As with Iraq, it is critical to reckon with how the looting of artefacts in Raqqa was fundamentally entangled with US imperialism and forms colonial desire, as well as the ways in which the international antiquities market functions as an extension of colonial-capitalist extraction. As UNESCO notes in a 2020 report, the Islamic State, clearly knowing the value of these artefacts, began to sell them in the antiquities market, and levied a tax on the value of the looted materials.5 

What is then emergent in these light halos is a complex web of witnessing. The brilliance of the project is that invites us to think through the consequences of invisibility as we see the light, an image of the artefact, its loss in the museum, its possible reemergence in the art market, and its disappearance into private, elite collections. In encountering Stolen Past, we are positioned as witnesses to the historical violence that led to the erasure and disappearance of these objects. Yet we are also left to wonder whether their survival as ghostly and fragile images might offer a faint glimmer of hope that the past they embody is not completely lost. Very much a deep reflection of his practice, Hrair Sarkissian’s Stolen Past provides moments of meditation, introspection, and contemplation of all that is invisible by shining light.