kar by Alex Sarkisian - Timespan
Source: https://timespan.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/kar-by-alex-sarkisian
Archived: 2026-04-23 17:11
kar by Alex Sarkisian - Timespan
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The weather in Helmsdale:
5°C
/
Broken clouds
We are open everyday 10am-5pm
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 Armenian sites 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.
Alex Sarkisian
is an artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow, working mainly with lens-based media and the materials that tend to it. They look at disruptions in historical narratives, allegorical reflections, and at times humorous interjections as forms of refusing coercive states. Sarkisian is curious about the unfolding of multiple timelines concurrently, and how they cling to and linger in material traces – us, soil, minerals, soundscapes, pixels. And how landscapes are sites where knowledge is both a fragile undercurrent and an unwavering surface.
Recent projects and residencies have been with: ICA Yerevan (2024), ACSL Yerevan (2024), Art Basis Gyumri (2024), Glasgow International (2021, 2018, 2016), Index Festival (2019), Intermedia Gallery CCA (2018). Sarkisian was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery (2015-2017) and is currently on the Board at Market Gallery. They are a plotholder at Merrylee Allotments, where a lot of the thinking takes place.
Press
The National
Highland first for artwork exploring Armenian erasure
Glasgow Art Map
kar Alex Sarkisian
Skip to content
The weather in Helmsdale:
5°C
/
Broken clouds
We are open everyday 10am-5pm
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 Armenian sites 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.
Alex Sarkisian
is an artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow, working mainly with lens-based media and the materials that tend to it. They look at disruptions in historical narratives, allegorical reflections, and at times humorous interjections as forms of refusing coercive states. Sarkisian is curious about the unfolding of multiple timelines concurrently, and how they cling to and linger in material traces – us, soil, minerals, soundscapes, pixels. And how landscapes are sites where knowledge is both a fragile undercurrent and an unwavering surface.
Recent projects and residencies have been with: ICA Yerevan (2024), ACSL Yerevan (2024), Art Basis Gyumri (2024), Glasgow International (2021, 2018, 2016), Index Festival (2019), Intermedia Gallery CCA (2018). Sarkisian was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery (2015-2017) and is currently on the Board at Market Gallery. They are a plotholder at Merrylee Allotments, where a lot of the thinking takes place.
Press
The National
Highland first for artwork exploring Armenian erasure
Glasgow Art Map
kar Alex Sarkisian