SARKIS

The reciprocal activation of work and surroundings is continued in earlier works loaned from prestigious public collections, including Défilé du Siècle en Fluo (1995), a series of custom-made children's dresses. With a lucid conceptual choreography, the work evokes the remembrance of people from different parts of the world, costuming their bodies in different time periods, and how we imagine a future for our existence. In a city like Baden-Baden, with a significant percentage of seniors among its residents, this testimony manifests as childhood reminiscence, through neon colors and futuristic forms of abstraction, glowing with intensity.

It was Sarkis’ time in Germany that prompted the artist to think deeply about the oppressive and limiting logic of Western art and to develop the concept of "Kriegsschatz" (war treasure). Thus it is no coincidence that with this exhibition, the artist returns to the tripoint area where Germany, France, and Switzerland converge. In the vicinity of Baden-Baden, especially during his professorship at the art academy in Strasbourg and in close dialogue with artists like Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broothaers and art historians like Pontus Hultén, Sarkis systematized the search for non-Western objects in order to contextualize them as objets trouvés (found objects)—objects assembled and juxtaposed by the artist without losing their intrinsic meaning. Sarkis’ belief that objects have lives of their own—with unique stories of pain and suffering—ultimately led him to the term “Leidschatz der Menschheit” (humanity’s treasure of suffering), coined by the German art historian Aby Warburg. As such, he interprets human history as a collective treasure and burden, intertwining it with his own memories and life.

“We see our role at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden as the continuous mediators of an open platform. History is never a completed process. As such, it is the material of our work and the foundation of our reality. We learn from Sarkis’ artistic practice, both in terms of human existence and ontological issues. The timeliness of staging this exhibition is not only linked to a new urgency in art production in view of the current wars in our world, it also substantiates the role of commemorative practices in the context of contemporary geopolitical developments. Especially in Germany, but also in a universal discursive framework, we support the deeper investigation of the generational, psychological, and social trauma of the victims of war, state violence and genocide, including the Armenian people… addressing this is an important step towards recognition, empathy, and remembrance. Art alone cannot solve our major problems, from climate crisis and environmental collapse to militarist gentrification and the politics of war, however, it changes our perspectives on how we react to them…” as directors Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız state.

Defne Ayas contributes with a further reflection: “Traumatic events—both personal and collective—are ever rife for exploitation, especially by politics. However, in the hands and visions of Sarkis, this human fragility moves beyond the economy of traumatic-cathartic loops and becomes a research cabal. I am proud that we can present this cinematographic montage at Kunsthalle Baden Baden that draws from Sarkis’ almost fifty-year-long commitment to the exploration of the term Kriegsschatz.”

In keeping with this modus operandi of artworks changing with the world, the Kunsthalle will hold incantations, meals and readings over seven days and seven nights during the exhibition period, as an interpretive gesture towards Sarkis’ constantly shifting compositions.

The exhibition has been staged by Sarkis in close collaboration with the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden directors Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız together with curator Defne Ayas, and assisted by Sandeep Sodhi.