For a long time, the father of the photographic artist Diana Markosian was absent from her life. “For almost my entire life, my father was nothing more than a cut-out silhouette in our family album. A reminder of what wasn’t there,” she says. During her childhood, he would disappear for months at a time, until her mother could no longer bear it and left. She separated from Markosian’s father and emigrated with the children from Moscow to California. Markosian was six years old at the time. While her mother used scissors to remove her father from daily life and the family photos, Markosian could not (and did not want to) erase her memory of him so easily. Fifteen years after she last saw him, she traveled to Armenia in search of him. She had neither a photograph nor a contact she could turn to. Eventually, she found him, and with her camera, she documented her efforts to rebuild their relationship over the course of a decade. With each visit, new facets of the lost parent emerged. The series “Father” is now on view at Fotografiska Berlin. As straightforward as the title is, so too is Markosian’s visual exploration of loss and the longing for belonging.

The artist reconstructs the fragile line between memory and repression. In Berlin, she shows how the search for an absent parent becomes an act of self-inquiry. Over more than ten years, she cautiously approaches a man who, in her biography, was more myth than man. The exhibition unfolds like a diary: intimate images, video works, fragments of conversations. Everything circles the question, “How can closeness be restored when time has long made it elusive?” Markosian invites us to bear complexity, beyond blame. Instead, she creates a space that understands family ties as living, contradictory organisms. Father shows that art can be healing without smoothing things over, and how vulnerable we become when we confront our own histories.

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Diana Markosian

Fotografiska Berlin, Oranienburger Str. 54, 10117 Berlin–Mitte; map
Diana Markosian: Father 21.11.2025–19.04.2026

@fotografiska.berlin
@markosian

It’s 80 years since the surrender of the Nazis – and 80 years since millions of Germans were forced to flee Eastern Europe in the final months of the war. The desperate, punishing journeys westward were scarcely documented beyond official Wehrmacht photographs, but now an exhibition is showing a collection of unique images of one such displacement for the first time. “The Trek – Photographs of a Displacement, 1945” at the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation unearths 140 images taken over five weeks in 1945 by photographers Hanns Tschira and Martha Maria Schmackeit. The pair used their Leica cameras to document 350 German refugees as they fled from Lübchen (now Lubów) in Lower Silesia, as Soviet troops overran the German army. These never-before-seen images of the exodus are accompanied by contemporary photographs taken by Ostkreuz photographer Thomas Meyer. Retracing the route the refugees took 80 years ago and returning to Lubów, Meyer makes visible the village inhabitants who themselves faced forced relocations after 1945. Displayed in dialogue with the historical photos, Meyer’s present-day portraits reveal how the legacies of past expulsions continue to linger today.

Text: Benji Haughton / Photos: Thomas Bruns, Hanns Tschira

Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Stresemannstr.90, 10963 Berlin–Kreuzberg; map

The Trek – Photographs of a Displacement, 1945
Until 18.01.2026, entry is free of charge.

@flucht_vertreibung_versoehnung