Artist: Sarkis

Dirimart presents Stays Together, the first London solo exhibition by acclaimed Turkey-born Armenian artist Sarkis (b. 1938, Istanbul).

One of the most significant voices in conceptual contemporary art, Sarkis represented Turkey at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and participated in the Armenian Pavilion’s group exhibition the same year. His work has been shown at leading institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. With more than 500 exhibitions worldwide since the 1960s, Stays Together unites twenty-four works created across different periods, employing diverse techniques and gestures, and demonstrates the wide variety in Sarkis’s oeuvre. Rich in imagery, the works form a cycle of questions and responses that explore what keeps us connected.

In his practice, Sarkis personifies each work and seeks its approval for inclusion in exhibitions. Produced in his Villejuif, Paris studio, every piece carries its own context while entering into dialogue with its surroundings. The intricate relationships among his works create a silent, multi-vocal resonance.

At the centre of the exhibition is In the beginning, candle (to Christian Bernard) (2023), an installation that brings together artworks between 1969 – the same year Sarkis created a piece for the renowned Institute of Contemporary Arts’ (ICA) exhibition When Attitudes Become Form – and 2023, in one composition. The installation offers a visual narrative of how these works have gathered over time: candle holders, a piece of lead resting on water, seven colours evaporating in white cups, Sarkis’s glass bust as a cosmonaut, a Curtis photo transformed into stained glass, and mirrors awash with rainbow hues. The entangled conversation between these works creates a chorus that resonates across times, spaces, and beliefs.

Observing this dialogue is Sarkis’s recent series, 85 Screams: After Munch (2023). Inspired by the figure in Munch’s The Scream – a fascination which has engaged Sarkis since his first encounter with the work in a newspaper as a child – the rapidly executed oil paintings, applied directly to paper without a brush, can be seen as self-portraits. He later transforms these artworks into stained glass, zooming in on the floating faces that are then dispersed throughout the exhibition.

The date of Sarkis’s works is always ‘today’. Artifacts from different centuries – such as the image of a female figure from the Neolithic era, a sixteenth- to seventeenth–century stone face, and a 1941 Leica camera – are all reinterpreted through techniques he has developed or invented and juxtaposed with everyday scenes. Through these encounters, he evokes the shared psyche of contemporary experience, drawing forgotten memories and collective hardships to the surface.

‘The events of history, the creations of humanity, in joy and in pain, are part of us, and this is our greatest treasure. What I have experienced, discovered, and made, forms my own treasure. If we manifest this in art, if we make it visible and tangible, we can travel through these forms. We can openborders instead of closing them. We can open horizons, open doors, and restore works and places.’— Sarkis

Although Sarkis has not exhibited in London since 1969, he maintains that, in his world, there is no notion of departure or return, as his homeland resides in his memory.