Mixed Retrospective

"Mixed Retrospective" is composed of a table which illuminates the floor underneath and ninety-two exhibition photographs on it. While installing Karışık Retrospektif, Sarkis used his artist friend Füreya’s desk. Exhibition photographs are displayed on this desk under a piece of glass. He displays the sum of his exhibitions atop a table, infusing the work with the convention of putting souvenir photos underneath the glass table-tops and incorporates this entirely domestic way of display into his work. It is a tradition to bring together photographs of our relatives, our children, our weddings, and our travels (but never death) and exhibit them on table-tops; encountering this tradition in an art gallery, especially when personal commemorations are replaced by photographs and visual memories concerning the history of the artworks, means that art and life are supposed to meet and unite in the same language. In this retrospective, which focuses on Sarkis’s output since 1986, a glass vase sits atop the table used as the pedestal for his works. The spring branches in the vase are constantly being replaced, drawing us towards life, perpetually preserving the freshness of memory. Sarkis placed newspaper bales on either side of the table, so that we can sit on them and examine the photographs more closely. The stacks of daily newspapers incorporate the macro-language of the press that records the present as history, along with its own medium.