Biography

Syria 1973. Lives in London.
Hrair Sarkissian earned his foundational training at his father’s photographic studio in Damascus. He is considered one of the leading conceptual photographers of his generation. Spanning photography, moving image, sculpture, sound and installation, Sarkissian’s practice creates meditative dreamscapes in some moments; deathscapes in others—sites where the muted voice, absent from the frame, is temporarily offered space to breathe. 

Sarkissian is on the Advisory Board of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. His 2020 exhibition at The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, was the first solo exhibition of a Syrian artist in the United States. Selected recent exhibitions include the British Art Show 9, the 14th  Sharjah Biennial, the Brighton Photo Biennial, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the Imperial War Museum in London, the Baltic Contemporary Art Centre in Newcastle, the 10th Bamako Encounters African Biennial of Photography, the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial (awarded the Golden Lion), Tate Modern in London, the New Museum in New York, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. 

His mid-career survey exhibition opened in October 2021 at the Sharjah Art Foundation, and toured to the Bonniers Museum in Stockholm (2022) and the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (2022/23). The exhibition brought together two major new commissions and more than a dozen of his most significant bodies of work from the preceding 15 years.