From 10 April to 6 September 2026, the Gallerie d’Italia presents Replaced, a solo exhibition by Diana Markosian, curated by Brandei Estes and produced by Intesa Sanpaolo as part of the third edition of EXPOSED - Torino Photo Festival. Conceived as an original project and presented as a world premiere, the exhibition combines photography and film to explore the dynamics of emotional relationships and the fragility of romantic myths.
The exhibition opens onto both intimate and universal questions: what happens when a love story comes to an end, and what does it mean to see oneself as having been replaced—whether in the life of those who once loved us or in places once perceived as sacred?
Replaced addresses these questions by exploring the persistence of grief and the transformation of memory, highlighting how gestures and places once considered exclusive can come to be shared with another person.
Through a series of photographs and a film adapted to the museum’s immersive gallery space, the artist reconstructs the dynamics of a romantic relationship, questioning the fragility of the romantic myth and the disorientation that follows its collapse. The work is shaped by the unsettling awareness that love can persist in the absence of the person who experienced it, and that gestures, places, and memories once believed to be singular can be reoccupied and shared again with someone else.
To confront these feelings, Markosian stages reenactments with an actor, restaging moments of tenderness alongside rupture. She thus operates on the unstable terrain of memory, where desire can distort, embellish, or erase, using the camera as an authorial tool that revisits the past while reshaping it in the present. What once unfolded beyond her control is now staged, framed, and replayed.
An immersive film, deployed across multiple walls of the gallery, extends this approach. Alternating single images and split-screen juxtapositions, it deepens the emotional resonance of the photographs while reanimating the scenes through narrative time.
Replaced ultimately offers a reflection on life after love, on how we navigate cycles of attachment, separation, and remembrance, in a fragile space between presence and absence, suspended between the desire to let go and the impulse to hold on.
