2017-2018

Family archives of the artist, liquid emulsion on armenian stones, and inkjet prints, various formats.

With the support of Armenian Art Foundation, Compagnia di San Paulo and ACSL residency.

For Dame Gulizar and Other Love Stories, Rebecca Topakian’s starting point is the unique story of her Armenian family, who lived in Turkey before her grandfather emigrated to France. This story is the love of her great-grandparents – Garabed and Gulizar –forbidden by their parents, until the kidnapping of Gulizar by Garabed, who came for her on his horse to take her to Constantinople.

Topakian explored this part of her identity by choosing fiction and mythology. Bearing the love story of her ancestors in mind while she traveled and lived in Armenia, desire became the thread of this work: it is a desire for earth, ground, identity, but also for the other’s body acting almost as a mirror. Following the ambiguity of the kidnapping of her great-grandmother, she also questions the ambiguity of her armenian identity as a woman : in between desire and the strong patriarchy showing itself even in the landscapes.


She printed her family archive pictures, through an analog process, on the surface of local stones that she found while walking in the Armenian mountains. It is a way of symbolically putting her ancestors back to the land they belong to, after they were all separated by exile. 

2018Photographic emulsion of stones (tuf, black obsidian, red obsidian, volcanic glass)

Rebecca Topakian gathered stones that are symbolic of Armenia: tuf (which is used in construction), black, red and brown obsidian (which is very present in the Armenian landscape , and glass from Lake Sevan. She analogically printed, in the darkroom, her own family archive pictures on the surface of the stones. Thus, she symbolically reconciles her people and the Armenian land.