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. She borrows from many photographic styles and mixes them with her own family archives. She also prints her family pictures in the darkroom directly on the surface of local stones that she found while walking in the Armenian mountains. She thus offers an intimate and impressionistic portrait of Armenia.

︎︎︎ Back to Dame Gulizar
︎︎︎ Dame Gulizar stones
︎︎︎ Dame Gulizar installation