Fantômes

Rosegallery is pleased to announce Fantômes, a solo exhibition of works by photographer Diana Markosian, opening on 13 December 2025.

Inspired by Victor Hugo’s Fantômes, this series offers an intimate glimpse into the Cuban National Ballet’s production of Giselle. First staged in Paris in 1841, Giselle tells the tragic story of a young woman who dies of heartbreak and returns as a spirit to redeem her lover. In Cuba, the ballet resonates differently, reflecting a cultural legacy once upheld as a symbol of national pride but now shadowed by uncertainty.¹

In Fantômes, Markosian captures this sense of impermanence, allowing movement to stretch and fade rather than freeze in time. Her dancers appear to hover between visibility and disappearance, their forms dissolving into light and shadow. The result evokes not only the spectral presence of Giselle herself but also the fragile persistence of Cuba’s ballet tradition—haunted, enduring, and beautifully ephemeral.

Markosian, herself a former ballet dancer, captures this tension with painterly intimacy, channeling a modern-day Degas. Her ethereal images dissolve the boundary between body and spirit: “Markosian’s dancers almost never appear solid but instead slump, fray, duplicate, and mist at the edges... These are melancholy and internal creatures, refugees in flight from their own bodies, or perhaps from the decaying world they inhabit.”²

Diana Markosian’s work bridges photography and film to explore themes of memory, identity, and belonging. Her acclaimed monographs Santa Barbara and Father were named Photo Book of the Year by MoMA, Time, and Le monde. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. A regular contributor to Vanity fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker, Markosian holds a Master of Science from Columbia University.