Featured Exhibitions

kar

Alex Sarkisian

Timespan

23/11/2025 - 01/03/2026

Installation view, kar, Alex Sarkisian, Timespan, 2025-26.

Film still, kar, Alex Sarkasian.

Alex Sarkisian
Timespan, Helmsdale
23/11/2025 – 01/03/2026

kar (Քար, meaning “stone”) is an exhibition and film work by Alex Sarkisian that traces the delicate survival of Western Armenian ancestral places. Moving across the Armenian Highlands through monasteries, cities and landscapes now within the coercive border of Turkey and left to ruin, the film gathers the slow violence of erasure: storms, earthquakes, military occupation, theft, and neglect. These sites, once vital to Armenian cultural and spiritual life, are today marked by deliberate abandonment and destruction by the Turkish state.

The film follows the filmmaker and their father on a return to Kharpert, their ancestral home, visited for the first time since the Armenian Genocide. This intergenerational journey carries the weight of loss and the persistence of memory, holding together the impossibility of preservation with the urgency of witnessing.

At Timespan, kar enters into dialogue with the Highland Clearances and our wider programme on land justice. The neglected Armeniansites echo the empty townships of Sutherland, where communities were displaced, traditions fractured, and landscapes reshaped for profit and control. Both contexts remind us how land is never passive: it is where power, belonging, and survival are contested.

In bringing kar to Helmsdale, we open a space to reflect on how landscapes carry trauma and cultural memory across geographies – and how struggles for justice in Armenia and in Scotland form a part of wider stories of dispossession and reclamation.

All photo credits: Gavin MacQueen.