The first publication in Poland devoted to one of the masters of contemporary art, Sarkis Zabunyan.
The artist’s multicultural biography, namely his Armenian origins, studies in Istanbul, and a Parisian career, finds reflection in different strands of his art. Sarkis takes interest in an anthropological view of local cultural traditions, experience of emigration and post-colonial threads, which delineate the framework of the European present. The important spheres of his activity include work with museum collections, treated as “vessels of memory” and, simultaneously, oblivion – areas of political and cultural concealments. Sarkis also notices, in the strategy of institutional storage, a risk to art posed by the practice of its hibernation. For this reason, the artist repeatedly applies the strategy of “awakening” to his interventions, aiming at the recovery and actualization of works of art, as it was under the project “Inviting. Sarkis-Kantor” in Cricoteca in 2019.
The catalogue comprises essays devoted to the artistic trajectory of Sarkis to date, and the philosophy and topics he has consistently explored, as well as the project which he has dedicated to Kantor. The book is illustrated with photographs of individual exhibitions in Warsaw and Krakow, and the documentation of the installations completed earlier in the Netherlands, France and Turkey.
Co-editor: Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
In collaboration with the Tadeusz Kantor Foundation
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage
