One of the pioneering figures in Turkey’s conceptual art scene, Sarkis employs a wide range of techniques and materials, including photography, video, painting, sculpture, stained glass, and neon lights, in his artworks imbued with symbolic images embracing subject-object and individual-society relationships. Combining Western intellectual traditions with the historically marginalised cultural traditions of the East, he addresses issues such as time, memory, identity, loss, belonging, and rebirth. Sarkis, who never exhibits his works in the same way twice without alteration, creates pieces that erase the boundaries between art and life with their constantly evolving and interreferential structures. Many of his works reference dramatic moments in human history by placing the past at the core, establishing a connection between the present and the future. Kriegsschatz (spoils of war) and leidschatz (treasure of suffering), the two fundamental concepts that inform his oeuvre from 1976 onwards, represent an individual’s struggle against a kind of oblivion within modern history, a fight for remembrance. The objects, which he de-contextualises and gives other meanings, reflect memory and related feelings such as victory, pain, and perhaps shame, opening up space for their transformation. According to Sarkis, art is always about new beginnings.
