In Andréas Lang’s photographs, what’s missing is often as important as what’s actually captured within the frame. A cave-studded rock formation looming over an empty road on the outskirts of the Turkish capital city of Ankara in his 2022 landscape image “Stanoz, Turkey,” for example, marks the site of an eponymous village populated for centuries by Armenians until the 1915 genocide. Today, all that is left of old Stanoz are a few gravestones.

In previous projects, the Berlin-based artist used this approach, which he defines as “visual archaeology,” to explore the lingering reverberations of the medieval Crusades and 19th-century German colonialism. His photographic excavations in Turkey were recently published in the book Broken Memories (Kerber Verlag, July 2023), which combines Lang’s pictures of places bearing the traces of the Armenian communities that once thrived in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) with those of sites where newer historical narratives are still being constructed and reinforced.1

....

• 1. “As an Armenian born and raised in Turkey, I didn’t even know about many of the places in Andréas’s photographs,” academic Aylin Vartanyan, who wrote a text for the Broken Memories book, said at a talk held at the Istanbul cultural center Depo in June. “At first I was ashamed of myself,” she said, adding that she subsequently began to reflect on how these stories had been actively rendered invisible.