ASSYRIANS

Romane Iskaria is an artist photographer who works in Brussels. Her approach to photography is both documentary and conceptual. She works on long-term photographic investigations to highlight the voices of forgotten people and tell their stories.

For Art au Centre, Romane Iskaria presents a sample of her work carried out for over two years around the Assyrian community, of which she has origins from her grandfather who left an Iranian Assyrian village to move to Marseille. These stateless people come from a region located between Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, they experienced a huge diaspora in more than 50 countries following a genocide that took place in 1915 and generated many territorial conflicts. Assyrians are Eastern Christians and speak a language called Suret. This community is very tightly knit and proud of its origins.

Romane Iskaria collects memories and evokes fantasy through photography, video, text, and sound to create installations of collective memory. Iskaria’s work has recently taken on the aspect of installations that combine videos and sculptures and steer her reflection around an initiatory journey that evokes the memory of the diaspora.

The large-format photographs were taken during the “Parcours Migratoire Inversé” project in collaboration with the Brussels association La Tour de Babel supported by Erasmus+ in September 2022. For this project, a group of 30 young people travelled for the first time to their homeland in the Tur Abdin region of Turkey.

The photographer also self-published her first book on this project. Entitled Assyrians, this book invites the reader to explore the Assyrian community and its history, alternating between photographs, archive images and a collection of intimate objects, punctuated by testimonies. This book was designed with graphic designer Camille Carbonaro (Macaronibook). Romane Iskaria created Assyrians as part of her second year of master’s degree in Photography at Ensav la Cambre, in Brussels.

Video of the book Assyrians: directed by Andrea Copetti from TipiBook Shop Bruxelles.