A Life Re-enacted: Diana Markosian interview for Aesthetica
It sounds like a storyline from a soap opera. Diana Markosian (b. 1989) was seven years old when she arrived in Santa Barbara, California, having moved from Moscow with her mother and older brother. They were there to visit a family friend, Eli, but the stay ended up becoming permanent when Svetlana, her mother, married Eli. It was only 20 years later – when the artist and her brother reconnected with their father, visiting him in Armenia for the first time since they’d left Russia – that Markosian discovered the truth about their migration. In fact, her mother had never met Eli before stepping off the plane on that day. The two had only corresponded through letters, having been introduced to one another by a matchmaking agency that helped women in former Soviet countries find American men to marry – their ticket to a brand new life.
A New Life. (2019) © Diana Markosian
In a way, it is a storyline from a soap opera. Markosian’s parents, both well-educated Armenians – an economist and an engineer – had moved to Moscow to complete their PhD studies in 1991. Here, they found themselves destitute in economic turmoil following the end of the Soviet Union. They had separated before their daughter was born. Svetlana, disillusioned with a new political reality, was an avid viewer of the American soap opera Santa Barbara. The 1980s series was hugely popular in Russia at the time – amongst the first western shows to be aired after the collapse of communism. It became one of the country’s longest-running programmes, screening from 1992 to 2002. The glamorous, sun-drenched lives of its attractive, wealthy characters – in particular the on-off romance between “supercouple” Eden Capwell and Cruz Castillo – inspired a heady fantasy in Svetlana.
Santa Barbara is also the name of Diana Markosian’s most recent body of work, made in 2019, a 14-minute short film and accompanying set of cinematic still images, currently on show at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, and concurrently at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The project follows two other highly personalised series, including Inventing My Father (2013-2014) and Mornings (With You) (2016), in which the artist explored the strange experience of re-establishing familial relationships after decades without contact. “It’s an attempt to understand [my mother],” she says of Santa Barbara. “There’s the initial shock, disappointment and anger, but I wanted to go beyond those feelings and really see my parents as people.” The title is more than a passing reference to her mother’s favourite TV show, it’s “the thread that held it all together,” says Markosian, who collaborated with one of the soap’s scriptwriters to reimagine Svetlana’s emotional and geographical journey…
