"Diana Markosian. Replaced" exhibition in Turin

From 10 April to 6 September 2026, Intesa Sanpaolo presents at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin, as part of the third edition of EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival, the exhibition Diana Markosian. Replaced, curated by Brandei Estes. Through a photographic exhibition and a film adapted for the museum’s immersive room, the artist reconstructs the dynamics of relationships, questioning the fragility of the romantic myth and the disorientation that follows their end.

The exhibition, originally commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo as an absolute preview at the Gallerie d'Italia – Turin, the exhibition unfolds from a set of questions that are at once intimate and universal: What happens when a love story ends? What does it mean to watch yourself be quietly replaced, not only in someone’s life, but within the same spaces that once felt sacred to you?

These are but a few of the questions that propelled Markosian to make Replaced. The work is born from the awareness that love can continue in your absence and that the gestures, places and memories once thought to belong only to you can be experienced with someone else. As a kind of emotional and psychological dislocation, the enduring pain that this project explores resides not only in the end of the relationship itself, but in the unsettling awareness that intimacy can be quickly shared and memories newly made with another.

The artist hires an actor to revisit moments from the past and reconstructs scenes of tenderness alongside moments of rupture. These reenactments inhabit the unstable terrain of memory, where desire alters, embellishes, and erases. By reliving these fragments, Markosian both prolongs and interrogates the intimacy that once ran through them, holding onto the sensation of falling in love for just a moment longer. The act of revisiting thus becomes an act of authorship: a way to exercise control over memory while gradually loosening its grip.

As a way of further exploring the effect of time and memory, Markosian has created a new immersive film that will be projected across multiple gallery walls. Alternating between single-image and split-screen juxtapositions, the film intensifies the dramatic effect of the photographs just as it reanimates the same scenes with narrative duration.

Ultimately reflecting on the emotional afterlife of love, Replaced reveals how we move through cycles of attachment, separation and remembrance, with images that inhabit the fragile space between presence and absence, between the desire to let go and the longing to remain.

Diana Markosian (Moscow, 1989) is an American artist of Armenian origin working across photography, film and installation. Her practice addresses themes of memory, displacement and the construction of personal and collective narratives, often rooted in her own biography.

Markosian has presented her work at major international institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the International Center of Photography and Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. In 2025 she received the Madame Figaro Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles for her exhibition Father.

Her works are held in significant public and private collections, and she is widely recognised for fostering a nuanced dialogue between documentary practice and scripted storytelling in contemporary art.