Press release ·
Second Alphabet: Sona Petrosyan
Press release for Sona Petrosyan's first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, fourteen graphite drawings of buildings that were specified and never built.
For immediate release. Amsterdam, 30 July 2026.
Gallery Borry presents Second Alphabet, the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Sona Petrosyan, at Hazenstraat from 18 September to 14 November 2026.
The exhibition brings together fourteen graphite drawings made since 2024, each of a building that was fully specified and never constructed. Petrosyan works from the paper that outlives a cancelled project: tender documents, load calculations, materials schedules and ministerial correspondence. Original drawings almost never survive. The numbers usually do.
From those numbers she reconstructs the building. Where the specification runs out she decides, and the decisions are listed on the verso of every sheet alongside the archival sources, so a viewer who reads the back of a drawing learns exactly how much of the front is invented. In this exhibition the proportion runs between a fifth and a third.
The title refers to the practice of transliteration in Soviet-era technical documents, where a project could be specified in one script, approved in another and filed in a third.
Petrosyan was born in Yerevan in 1980 and lives in Berlin. She studied at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts and at the Städelschule, and was awarded a Villa Massimo fellowship in July 2026. Her work is in the collections of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Wende Museum and Kumu Art Museum.
An opening reception will be held on Thursday 17 September from 18:00.
Press images and further information: [email protected]