Untitled, 2024, Mixed Media on Paper, 79 x 100 cm
In Annie Kurkdjian’s world, bodies twist, recoil, and often fold in on themselves. Their gestures are bold but hesitant, and their forms at once commanding and collapsed. These figures, raw in their vulnerability and absurd in their quiet grotesqueness, are far more than characters for Kurkdjian. They are vessels carrying trauma, memory, and a childhood disrupted by war.
Born in Beirut in 1972, Kurkdjian came of age during Lebanon’s civil war, a time of ambient terror and psychological instability. Her own family’s experience was marked by tragedy; at the age of twelve, she lost her father to a violent murder just as they were preparing to flee the country. The next day, pictures of the crime scene were published in newspapers. A teenager with PTSD, she carried both inherited and lived trauma – that of an Armenian legacy steeped in genocide, and that of her own war-torn youth.
This dissonance, instability, and uncertainty that have permeated her ‘ordinary’ life are stitched into her visual language. Kurkdjian’s canvases are haunted by disproportionate, emotionally fraught figures: children feeding from mothers, bodies eating themselves, limbs locked in surreal loops. At first glance, the humor is dark. But under its surface lies something much more human: an interrogation of empathy itself.
Untitled, 2023, Mixed Media on Paper, 113 x 77 cm
Untitled, 2020, Ink on Paper, 40 x 40 cm
That’s because Kurkdjian’s practice was shaped not only by her history, but by her intellectual curiosity. After leaving her banking career and delving into the world of management, theology, and psychology, she pursued Fine Arts, where she found her voice in drawing. Her work gives primacy to the line. The influence of Roland Topor, with his stark, alienated figures and haunting visual poetry, is palpable. Like Topor, Kurkdjian renders discomfort with precision. But unlike him, her lines seem to carry a quiet plea for reconciliation between the self and its shadows, the pain and the viewer.
Her characters live in tight, almost suffocating spaces, confronting the limits of their own agency. The narratives are rarely, if ever, resolved. The aftermath, ambiguity, and ache of incompletion are blatant. Her cats, her hands, her looping fabrics and fragmented limbs all suggest a search for control and physicality in a reality that’s constantly escaping them.
Kurkdjian once said that art is capable of sublimating everything – war, shame, sickness, and total hell. Her work doesn’t seek to explain or escape those things. Instead, it holds them close, dissects them, and invites us to feel them purely, deeply, humanly.
Untitled, 2022, Mixed Media on Paper, 120 x 90 cm
Untitled, 2023, Mixed Media on Paper, 65 x 100 cm
Annie Kurkdjian holds regular exhibitions in France, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan, and several other countries. In Lebanon, she is represented by the LT Gallery.
All images courtesy of the artist.