iBoghossian Foundation - Villa EmpainIxelles
Hrair Sarkissian's installation Stolen Past, on artefacts lost from Raqqa's museum, set against Iconem's immersive images of Palmyra.
Forty-eight thin translucent plaques stand in rows like funerary stelae. Lit from behind, each shows what looks like a black-and-white photograph of an object that vanished from the Raqqa Museum in Syria. The museum held some 8,000 pieces before Islamic State looted it between 2013 and 2017; about 880 are known to survive.
Hrair Sarkissian, who learned photography in his father's studio in Damascus, made these lithophanes on a 3D printer, reviving a mid-nineteenth-century technique, so you look at each lost object through light rather than at the thing itself. Set against them are Iconem's digital reconstructions of Palmyra, with the Monumental Arch and the Temples of Bel and Baalshamin.
It is a quiet, sombre room in the villa's Project Space, seen on the same €15 ticket as the main show. Weekend visits need an arrival slot booked online.
Stolen Past
Look for the 48 backlit plaques arranged like gravestones, each showing a missing Raqqa artefact as a pale photographic image in the light.
Iconem's Palmyra
Large digital images rebuilt from 3D scans of Palmyra show the Monumental Arch and the Temples of Baalshamin and Bel.