The northern ibis is a bird with a distinctive black head plumage and a curved red beak.
It appears in the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic drawings and is also mentioned in the Bible story of Noah's Ark.
An entire room is currently dedicated to the bird at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, as part of the exhibition by Syrian-born artist Hrair Sarkissian.
Seven bird skull replicas are reminiscent of the northern bald ibis, a video shows its migratory flight route, and a last photo is reminiscent of it.
Because the bird is a victim of the violence of the people and the state apparatus, which keeps Sarkissian busy.
In Syria, the animal was considered extinct - until a colony of seven wallrapp ibises was discovered in the ancient city of Palmyra.
Only one female bird is said to have known the flight routes of its species.
Conservationists offered a $1,000 reward for the animal when there was still concern for birds in the area.
The Syrian civil war made this work increasingly impossible, and when the terrorists of the "Islamic State" destroyed Palmyra in 2014, the northern ibis disappeared again.
With the installation "Final Flight" (2019), Sarkissian finds moving images of what people and states do to the weakest.
"The Other Side of Silence" is the name of the Maastricht show that spans around twenty years of his work.
He films the father looking at the old homeland
The 49-year-old Sarkissian was born in Damascus, learned photography in his father's studio and later studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
Today the artist lives in London, works with videos, photos, sculptures and soundscapes.
His grandparents were survivors of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians.
Some of his works deal with this family history.
"Sweet and Sour" from 2022, for example, shows three large video screens in a darkened room.
On the left are scenes from rural Sasun, a region now part of Turkey and home to many Armenians in the early last century.
Valleys, trees, a hut can be seen.
A small herd of cattle walks past a stone wall and blue plastic chairs.
The video on the opposite wall shows an elderly man looking past the camera.
Sometimes one thinks that his lips are twitching, his eyes are getting wet.
The whole time his breathing can be heard in the room.
In a third film, placed between the other two, a man sits with his back to the viewer, looking out over a mountainous landscape.
It is Sarkissian himself, the other is his father.
The son had traveled to Turkey to film - then left a camera rolling while his father viewed images from his ancestral homeland.
Where marketplaces are places of execution
Damascus was the family's refuge – and it was here that Sarkissian experienced the brutality of the regime at the age of eleven.
On his way to school he passed a square where three men had just been executed - he could never forget the sight of the dead.
His most well-known work can also be seen in the Bonnefanten Museum: "Execution Squares" from 2008 shows public squares in Syrian cities, mostly in the morning light that seems peaceful.
Only those who read the description of the large-format photos will learn that the regime executed people in all these places.
In the walk-in installation "Deathscapes" from 2020, on the other hand, it is only noises that tell the story - the visitors stand in a dark cube and hear loud working noises.
Pickaxes, shovels, falling debris, a few bird calls.
They are photos of an excavation: in Spain, archaeologists uncovered a mass grave from the time of Franco's fascist dictatorship.
A work completed in 2021, “Last Seen”, shows empty rooms, sofas, kitchens, places of family conviviality that have become silent.
People whose relatives were murdered, died in wars or have disappeared showed the artist where they last saw them - in Argentina, Bosnia, Lebanon.
For all the artistic range and technical virtuosity that is visible in his works - the main goal of his work is to "wake people up", says Sarkissian.
He doesn't see this as political, but in the sense of "sharing pain" that makes it possible to understand the suffering of others.
His work is also directed against forgetting.
Again and again he meets people who, for example, denied the Armenian genocide.
The people who appear in Sarkissian's art let him into their private spheres - and they do so very willingly, he says.
It's a way of showing the world the consequences of mass violent crime.
For many of the families of those killed, time has basically stood still, the past has never passed.
Hrair Sarkissian. The Other Side of Silence.
Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht;
until May 14th.
No catalogue.