Curated by Claartje van Dijk
Exhibition co-produced by Rencontres d'Arles and Foam, Amsterdam
Publications: Diana Markosian, Father, Atelier EXB, 2024; Diana Markosian: Father, Aperture, 2024.
Born in Moscow, Markosian was seven years old when her mother woke her up in the middle of the night and told her they were going on a trip.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, her parents’ marriage had come to an end.
The family boarded a flight to the United States without saying goodbye to her father.
The next day, Markosian’s father found the apartment empty, with only a note left by his wife on the kitchen table.
His family was gone. This marked the beginning of a 15-year search to find Markosian and her brother.
Once in California, the artist’s mother cut her father’s image out of family photos. His absence left Markosian with a deep sense of mystery and confusion. In her first monograph, Santa Barbara (2020), the artist confronted her family’s history. The project retraced her family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the United States in the 1990s. The film, publication, and exhibition evoked her mother’s decision to leave her homeland and make the ultimate sacrifice to become American.
Fifteen years after last seeing him—without a photograph to remember him by or an address to guide her—Markosian set out to find her father in Armenia. The encounter with a man who had become a stranger carried with it a profound sense of lost time.
An intimate portrait, Father tells the complex story of a father and daughter trying to rebuild the emotional foundation they once shared. Through documentary photographs, archival materials, and vernacular imagery, the artist explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation, and the shared void left by their long separation.
— Claartje Van Dijk
