Hrair Sarkissian’s luminous archive of absence and the politics of cultural erasure.
At Ibraaz’s Majlis space in London, Hrair Sarkissian’s ‘Stolen Past’ unfolds as a quiet but insistent meditation on loss, memory and the afterlives of objects displaced by war. Comprising rows of softly glowing forms, the installation resists spectacle, opting instead for a subdued visual language that lingers somewhere between memorial and reconstruction.
Hrair Sarkissian, ‘Stolen Past’, Ibraaz. Image courtesy of the artist and Ibraaz. Photo Ollie Hammick.
The work centres on the looted collection of the Raqqa Museum in northern Syria, once home to thousands of artefacts spanning from prehistoric tools to medieval ceramics. Between 2013 and 2017, during the occupation of the city by the Islamic State, the museum was systematically dismantled. Objects were either destroyed or trafficked into global black markets, leaving only a fraction of the original collection intact.
Sarkissian approaches this rupture not through direct representation, but through a process of translation. Using a nineteenth-century lithophane technique, he reconstructs images of missing artefacts as translucent panels, revealed only when lit from behind. These panels, embedded within tombstone-like plinths, produce a spectral archive of what can no longer be physically accessed. The result is neither replica nor document, but something more unstable, an image that flickers between presence and disappearance.
Hrair Sarkissian “Stolen Past”. Courtesy of the artist and Ibraaz. Photo Ollie Hammick.
Sarkissian approaches this rupture not through direct representation, but through a process of translation. Using a nineteenth-century lithophane technique, he reconstructs images of missing artefacts as translucent panels, revealed only when lit from behind. These panels, embedded within tombstone-like plinths, produce a spectral archive of what can no longer be physically accessed. The result is neither replica nor document, but something more unstable, an image that flickers between presence and disappearance.
What emerges is a practice deeply invested in making absence visible. Sarkissian, long concerned with histories of violence and erasure, extends his inquiry here into the realm of material culture. The installation refuses closure. Instead, it stages a space where loss is continuously negotiated, where the viewer is implicated in witnessing what has been systematically undone.
There is also a pointed geographic and political framing at play. Presented in London, a major node in the circulation of illicit antiquities, ‘Stolen Past’ subtly implicates the infrastructures that sustain such economies. It asks not only what has been lost, but where these objects might have gone and under whose authority they continue to circulate.
Within Ibraaz’s broader curatorial emphasis on restitution and repair, the exhibition resonates as both elegy and critique. It gestures toward the limits of recovery, acknowledging that reconstruction can never fully restore what has been erased. Yet, in its fragile illumination, it insists on a different kind of preservation, one rooted in memory, community effort, and the persistence of the image.
In ‘Stolen Past’, history does not return intact. It glows faintly, held in suspension, asking to be remembered differently.
This exhibition is on view at Ibraaz Majlis, London, until 24 May 2026.
