Michaela Crimmin and Hrair Sarkissian

Michaela Crimmin is an independent curator and co-director of the not-for profit agency, Culture+Conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA.

Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer who was brought up in Damascus and who now lives and works in London. His practice explores his own personal memories and histories and the relationship between visibility and invisibility.

In this podcast, our guests discuss Sarkissian's formative years working in his father’s studio in Damascus, the notion of home and identity and the aesthetic and political capacities of photography, especially in relation to trauma and personal and social histories.

This is the second in a new series of talks for the Roberts Institute of Art podcasts, where artists, cultural practitioners and other thinkers are invited to discuss a theme connected to our programmes and contemporary culture.

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We recommend you take a look at Sarkissian’s website where you can look closely at the photographic series discussed: ‘Home Sick’, ‘Unexposed', ‘Sarkissian’s Photo Centre & my father & I', and ‘Last Scene’, for example.

Michaela Crimmin works as an independent curator and is co-director of Culture+Conflict, a not-for-profit agency profiling and supporting artists whose work relates to international conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA, and most recently led a major EU-funded research programme that included a residency with Delfina Foundation by Noor Abuarafeh, an artist from Palestine; a forthcoming film commission that opens at Gasworks in October this year by Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer; and a symposium with The Showroom and Tate co-programmed with Elvira Dyangani Ose asking to what extent can art affect change when addressing issues of migration, displacement, and access.

Previously she was Head of Arts at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), a role that included initiating and directing the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre; and coordinating the first works of art on the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square.

Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer. Born and raised in Damascus, he earned his foundational training at his father’s photographic studio, where he spent all his childhood vacations and where he worked full-time for twelve years after high school. In 2010 he completed a BFA in Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. He lives and works in London since 2011. He will be showing in the British Art Show 9 (2021) and his first mid-career survey, Hrair Sarkissian: The Other Side of Silence, curated by Dr Omar Kholief, will be shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and the Bonnefanten, Maastricht (2021-2022).

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