Series of 15 archival inkjet prints, 100×150 cm each, and 17 portraits printed on perspex 25x25x10 cm each. 

 

Front Line draws on Sarkissian’s own Armenian identity to contemplate the uneasy predicament of a people and place with an unknown political destiny. They look at a war-torn enclave between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the self-proclaimed independent Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

 

Throughout the centuries the claims over this territory have shifted, the borders been mapped and remapped, yet the repression of the region’s indigenous Armenians has persisted. Today, over a million of its Azeri and Armenian inhabitants remain displaced. The photographs portray both the landscape and those that fought during the 1988-1994 war. Through a sense of isolation, estrangement and haunting, the works raise questions about the price of war and the contradictions inherent within struggles for national independence.