Hrair Sarkissian: Horizon

Shot by drone across a perilous expanse, Hrair Sarkissian’s two-channel video installation, Horizon (2016), charts one of the shortest and most common refugee routes from Ka on the southwestern Turkish shore, across the Mycale Strait, to the island of Megisti on the edge of southeastern Greece. Sarkissian writes of this journey “into the unknown” as marked by extreme uncertainty wherein “there is just one line to hold on to: the horizon. A line that divides the blues of the water and the sky, the up and the down. It visualizes how close the future is, a starting point for building up hopes and dreams, a refuge for escaping the darkness of the present, while holding onto the memories of the past.”

Born and raised in Damascus, Sarkissian trained in his father’s photographic studio, completed a B.F.A. in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and has lived and worked in London since 2011.

Curated by Lisa Fischman, with generous support from the Maryam and Edward Eisler / Goldman Sachs Gives Fund on Art and Visual Culture in the Near, Middle, and Far East at the Davis Museum.

Image: Horizon, 2016. Two channel video, HD, 6min 58sec. Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens - Thessaloniki.