SARKIS
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SARKIS
The three-dimensional works by Sarkis from the end of the sixties were based on the dialectical relations between their constitutive elements and the contradictory nature of these elements within themselves. The theme of war became more manifest in his series of Blackouts from the mid-seventies on, in which he exposed the tension between protection and erasure, maintenance of memory and its blockage, visualisation and concealment. The social dimension of memory was further elaborated in his series of Kriegschatz (the spoils of war), which, as a word, marked the appropriation and brutal decontextualisation of someone else's, the beaten one´s memory. This term that has operated as a leitmotiv in the successive productions of Sarkis was also mobilised against the isolating, homogenising and ossifying conventions of museology. But no victory is absolute. Sarkis' projects make use of objects laden with social and mnemonic repercussions; yet, they go well beyond the constraints of remaining merely as nostalgic flashback; they perform, interpret and activate their material, in the most affirmative manner, in relation to the painful past and the promising future. This togetherness of pain and hope, the potentialities inherent in human suffering were later brought forward in his other leitmotiv Leidschatz (the treasures of suffering). Towards the end of the seventies, Sarkis translated his affirmative stance into his take on space. Parallel to the introduction of light and colour into his works, Sarkis paid more attention to the spatial qualities of memory. This, in turn, opened up his works to cultural specificity and autobiographical elaboration. Sarkis' exhibition held in 1993 with the title From Ankara to the Present covered a life span of nearly three decades, separating the artist's first exhibition in Ankara from his second. As is characteristic to his entire oeuvre, he brought together conflictual elements; such as the colour red and its complemetary green; and the watercolour drawings of his previous projects and the butcher knifes that pierce and nail them onto a wooden platform. While stabbed and wounded, these drawings have succeeded to survive and multiply into the future. Erden Kosova |