Vartuhi – Invisible Side of Rose Lady is a fictional narrative rooted in Silva Bingaz’s sense of absence—her inability to witness the trips her daughter Vartuhi occasionally took to the Netherlands with her father. Nearly a decade after separating from her Dutch partner, with whom she had lived for many years in Istanbul, Bingaz returns to the Netherlands—not as a member of a family, but as a photographer. At first, she imagines creating a poetic story by revisiting the places her daughter once walked with her father. Instead, she finds herself immersed in a global sense of alienation and loneliness.
Bingaz gave her daughter the name of her own mother, which means “rose” in Armenian. For her, motherhood is indescribable but deserves historical reverence. The hidden weapons in the rose garden of the “Rose Lady” symbolize both personal and collective isolation—the ways in which people withdraw and create invisible ghettos around themselves. What a photographer can do, perhaps, is leap over these barbed wires and imagine a reversed world.