Second Alphabet

Sona Petrosyan’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands opens at Hazenstraat on 18 September.

Second Alphabet presents fourteen new graphite drawings, all made since 2024, all of buildings that were fully specified and never constructed. Petrosyan works from the paper that outlives a cancelled project: tender documents, load calculations, schedules of materials, ministerial correspondence about a foundation that will never be poured. Original drawings almost never survive. The numbers usually do.

From those numbers she reconstructs the building. This is not reproduction and Petrosyan does not present it as such. Where the specification runs out, she decides, and the decisions are listed on the verso of each sheet alongside the archival sources. A viewer who reads the back of a drawing learns exactly how much of the front is invented. Most of the sheets in this exhibition are between a fifth and a third guesswork.

The title refers to the Armenian practice of transliteration in Soviet-era technical documents, where a building could be specified in one script, approved in another and filed in a third, accumulating small errors at each step. Petrosyan treats her own reconstructions as one more transliteration in that chain. The building was never real. The documents are. The drawing is a third thing.

All fourteen works are drawn at the same scale and in the same three quarter view, an architectural convention that gives a proposal the same standing as a photograph. Nothing in the tonal range is allowed to assert itself. The effect, in a room of fourteen, is of a city that was decided on and then quietly not built.

An opening reception will be held on Wednesday 17 September from 18:00.