Alexandra Karakashian showcases Every Buried Sun at Southern Guild, Cape Town

Southern Guild presents Every Buried Sun, Alexandra Karakashian’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 18 – October 19, 2026, at their Cape Town space in South Africa. Showcasing large-scale installations, works on aluminium, oil paintings on canvas and works on paper, the art exhibition examines the relationship between materiality and memory, asking what remains after 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,” Southern Guild notes.

Karakashian’s practice is informed by histories of migration and displacement, including her family’s experience of the Armenian Genocide, alongside the environmental and political consequences of extraction and ecological collapse. Every Buried Sun shifts her attention from fracture towards persistence, considering how matter breaks down, changes and assumes new forms. Central to this is the contemporary artist’s use of used engine oil, which she understands in relation to the idea of oil as ‘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,” the contemporary art gallery explains.

The South African artist also works with salt, charcoal, paper, textile and pigment, allowing the physical properties of each material to shape the work. Her continued experimentation with aluminium introduces a contrasting surface: rigid and resistant, reflecting light differently than paper and textile. “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,” Southern Guild explains.

The changing relationships between light and darkness, burial and emergence also inform 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”, the gallery notes. “Her inherited relationship to the Armenian Genocide makes questions of how histories are seen, remembered and repeated inseparable from the violence of the present.”

Every Buried Sun considers inheritance as something that extends beyond the familial to encompass landscapes, political histories and environmental damage. “The earth inherits what we leave behind,” Karakashian states, connecting human memory to the longer timescales of geological change. “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,” Southern Guild states.