British Art Show 9
Aberdeen Art Gallery

It’s pitch black, and I am down in a ditch with a team of diggers. I can’t see them, but I can hear everything: ­sometimes heavy shovelling, sometimes gentle raking. Occasionally the sounds stop: perhaps they’ve found another body.

This is a darkened room at Aberdeen Art Gallery – but the sounds I’m hearing are 1,500 miles away, in Madrid. Hrair Sarkissian, an artist of Syrian-Armenian heritage who as a young man visited the biggest mass grave of victims of the Armenian genocide, made these recordings at the site where Spain is currently opening up a grave believed to contain the remains of more than 33,000 victims of its 1936-39 civil war. Dismantling the burial site, at the Basilica of the Holy Cross in what is known as the Valley of the Fallen, is deeply significant as it’s been a focus for far-right sympathisers for many years.