Every Buried Sun

Every Buried Sun is Alexandra Karakashian’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Presenting new large-scale works on aluminium alongside oil paintings on canvas, works on paper, and installations, the exhibition extends Karakashian’s longstanding investigation into the natural world, materiality, and loss. Across this new body of work, she turns towards what persists through rupture and the quiet processes of transformation unfolding beneath the surface, tracing relationships between light and darkness, burial and emergence.

Karakashian’s practice is shaped by histories of migration and displacement, including her family’s experience of the Armenian Genocide, and by the consequences of extraction, environmental degradation, and human intervention in the environment. While previous bodies of work have traced fracture across histories and inheritances, Every Buried Sun pays closer attention to what survives in their wake. Rather than imagining repair as a return to an unbroken state, Karakashian considers the processes through which matter breaks down, alters, and takes on new forms, and the residues that remain.

Central to this thinking is Karakashian’s longstanding use of used engine oil and her evolving understanding of oil drawn from beneath the earth as a form of “ancient sunlight.” Formed from organic matter, buried and transformed over millions of years, oil contains energy absorbed by living organisms in the distant past. This material reality introduces a generative contradiction: a substance that appears black and dense holds within it traces of ancient life and light. Light becomes something that can be absorbed, stored, and transformed, while the oil itself bears the accumulated weight of industry, extraction, conflict, and ecological crisis. Material, political, and spiritual associations converge within it, extending its significance beyond its immediate physical presence.

For Karakashian, materials are never passive. Used engine oil, salt, charcoal, paper, textile, and pigment act upon the formation of her work, each with distinct properties and connotations. They spread, pool, absorb, and shift beyond the gestures of her application, with the artist relinquishing a degree of control over the way they behave.

Every Buried Sun expands this vocabulary through aluminium, following several years of experimentation with the material. Its rigid, resistant surface offers a counterpoint to the absorbency and fragility of paper and textile, allowing the works to change in relation to the viewer, the gallery, and the movement of light.

Light consequently operates throughout the exhibition as a physical condition as much as a conceptual thread. It moves through linen, reflects off a contained pool of oil, and shifts across surfaces over the course of the day. Transient and continually changing, light alters the materials and spaces it encounters, moving between states of presence and absence. Light and darkness no longer operate as polarities, but as conditions capable of existing within one another.

Burial and resurfacing unfold across different scales: oil is drawn from beneath the earth; histories continue to act upon the present; what appears absent can remain active below the surface. To unearth, in this context, is not to discover something previously unknown, but to recognise what has remained present without being clearly seen. These ideas extend into Karakashian’s broader consideration of attention and witnessing at a moment when images of war, genocide, ecological collapse, and human suffering circulate with unprecedented immediacy. Her inherited relationship to the Armenian Genocide makes questions of how histories are seen, remembered, and repeated inseparable from the violence of the present.

Painting offers a deliberately different temporal register. Rather than compete with the speed of contemporary image culture, Karakashian uses abstraction to create a slower space for looking. “When everything is immediate, attention itself becomes fragile,” she says. Her paintings ask viewers “to remain with something a little longer, without rushing towards certainty or resolution.”

Every Buried Sun ultimately locates these questions within a continuum that exceeds an individual lifespan. For Karakashian, inheritance extends beyond the familial: landscapes, political histories, environmental damage, systems of extraction, and ways of seeing pass between generations. “The earth inherits what we leave behind,” she states, collapsing distinctions between human and geological archives.

This new body of work becomes an exercise in persistence rather than recovery. What has passed from view has not necessarily disappeared. Light remains stored within matter; histories continue to exert their presence; materials and forms return altered by what has been imposed upon them. Painting becomes a space in which accumulation and erosion, rupture and repair can coexist, and through which what cannot be easily represented might nonetheless be held.


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Every Buried Sun runs concurrently with Kala, a solo exhibiton by Simphiwe Buthelezi.