Karen Zalamea, Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas), 2024–25, cyanotype on watercolour paper, 30.5 x 23 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Chico), 2025, inkjet print on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Family Album), 2022–, inkjet print on canvas, nylon rope, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Every Surface Is a Shrine), 2025, marble, 36 x 43.5 x 3.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea, Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas), 2024–25, cyanotype on watercolour paper, 30.5 x 23 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Chico), 2025, inkjet print on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Family Album), 2022–, inkjet print on canvas, nylon rope, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography.
Karen Zalamea, Sunken Garden (Every Surface Is a Shrine), 2025, marble, 36 x 43.5 x 3.2 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Karen Zalamea: Every Surface is a Shrine
Opening Reception & Tour
Saturday, March 7, 2 – 4:30 pm
Artist & Curator Tour to begin at 2 pm
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Every Surface Is a Shrine brings together a selection of photo-based works by Karen Zalamea that traces the shifting boundaries between material, memory, and place. Rooted in a critical exploration of photography’s expanded possibilities, Zalamea’s practice reimagines the medium not only as an image-making tool but as a methodology of care, labour, and cultural inquiry.
Spanning sculpture, installation, video, and historical processes, the exhibition highlights Zalamea’s sustained engagement with her diasporic identity. Central to the exhibition is Sunken Garden (2020–), a growing body of work that transforms her ancestral home in Quezon City, Philippines, into a site of archival and speculative reconstruction. From manipulated still and moving images of chico trees to hand-woven photographic ropes made from reprinted family archives, Zalamea enacts what she terms “trans-Pacific kinwork” – a way of linking generations, geographies, and embodied histories through intimate material processes.
The exhibition takes its title from a sculptural object: a marble slab, with its inscription of text evoking geological memory and the embedded weight of repeated touch. The concept of surface as a site of memory further expands in Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (2024–), which reconfigures nineteenth-century botanical illustrations as cyanotypes – layering colonial histories of extraction with photographic processes tied to scientific imaging and feminist authorship.
Across these interconnected works, Zalamea meditates on photography’s role in holding, translating, and reanimating histories. Her practice foregrounds the photograph not as a static representation but as a mutable object to forge correspondences between the personal and the political, the archival and the embodied.
