Gallerie d’Italia presents Replaced, a new body of work by photographer Diana Markosian that confronts the relationship between love and heartbreak. Both poetic and cinematic, Replaced unfolds across photography and film and marks a bold new chapter in Markosian’s evolving interdisciplinary practice. Known for blurring the line between memory and reconstruction, the artist turns her lens inwards once again.
The exhibition coincides with the release of Markosian’s photobook of the same name, co-published by Allemandi and Atelier EXB, extending the project’s emotional resonance beyond the gallery space.
Replaced begins with questions that feel both intimate and universal: what happens when a love story ends and what does it mean to watch yourself be quietly exchanged not only in someone’s life, but within the same spaces that once felt sacred?
The work is shaped by the unsettling realization that love can continue in your absence and that gestures, places and memories you once believed were yours alone can be shared again with someone else. Its emotional weight lies not just in the end of a relationship, but in the disorienting awareness that intimacy is not fixed, that it can be remade and lived again with another.
To confront these feelings, Markosian stages reenactments with an actor, reconstructing moments of tenderness alongside rupture. Moving through the unstable terrain of memory, where desire can distort, embellish and erase, she uses the camera as a tool of authorship, revisiting the past while shaping it in the present. What once unfolded beyond her control is now directed, framed and performed anew.
An immersive film, unfolding across multiple gallery walls, extends this approach. Shifting between single images and split-screen pairings, it deepens the emotional resonance of the photographs while reanimating the scenes through narrative time.
Replaced ultimately reflects on the emotional afterlife of love, how we move through cycles of attachment, separation and remembrance. The images linger in a fragile space between presence and absence, suspended between the urge to let go and the desire to hold on.
Diana Markosian (b. 1989, Moscow) is an American artist of Armenian descent. Working between documentary and staged image-making, Markosian examines how photographs give form to absence, longing and the reconstruction of the past. Across her projects, loss emerges as a generative condition, shaping narratives that revisit formative ruptures and the fragile architectures of belonging. In Santa Barbara (2020), she reflects on migration and the fragmentation of home through the lens of her family’s relocation to the United States. In Father (2024), Markosian turns toward the possibility of repair, tracing an attempt at reconnection with her estranged father after decades of absence. With her latest body of work, Replaced (2026), this investigation extends into the terrain of romantic intimacy, examining the vulnerability of grounding identity in a shared future and the disorientation that emerges when that imagined future dissolves.
Markosian’s work has been exhibited at leading international institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, New York, and FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam. In 2025, she was awarded the Madame Figaro Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles for her exhibition Father. Her work is held in prominent public and private collections and she is widely recognized for advancing a nuanced dialogue between documentary practice and staged narrative within contemporary art.
Zach Ritter
Diana Markosian : Replaced
Through September, 2026
Gallerie d’Italia
Piazza San Carlo, 156
10121 Torino TO, Italy
https://gallerieditalia.com/en/turin/exhibitions-and-initiatives/
