Carbon, Carbon Everywhere
21th August, 2025 – 2nd October, 2025
Hypha HQ
Unit 3, Euston Tower
286 Euston Rd
London NW1 3AS
An exhibition tracing carbon’s transformations across bodies, environments, and time, featuring works by twelve international artists.
“Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.”
— Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007
Integral to the constitution of our bodies, soil, air, and some rocks, carbon is a highly bonding element that incessantly transmutes from state to state, each particle challenging the boundaries between life and non-life. Bringing together works by twelve international artists, Carbon, Carbon Everywhere explores the shifting states of carbon, an element that threads through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.
black and blue, 220 x 250 cm
The title of the exhibition is a quote from the landmark essay Carbon by the writer and chemist Primo Levi. In the essay, Levi traces the journey of a single particle of carbon across distinct states and beings: from resting on a rock edge for hundreds of millions of years, to entering the world of “things that change” — swiftly shifting from the atmosphere to the lungs of a falcon, to the sea, to the trunk of a cedar, and eventually into the writer’s own body from a glass of milk on his desk.
Resolutely specific yet universal, Levi’s story highlights the singularity of carbon as an element that inherently connects all things through its relentless transformation. It fossilises, mutates, preserves, pollutes, and nourishes. From its ancient geological formations to its current atmospheric volatility, carbon is never still, shifting between forms and contexts in an ongoing process of exchange.
Featuring works across distinct media — sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, installation, and material experimentation — the exhibition examines carbon through an entanglement of time and space. It asks how matter shifts meaning across bodies and systems. Making visible otherwise unseen physical processes of transformation and exchange, the works on view reflect on notions of timelessness and change, preservation and destruction, order and chance, highlighting with palpable lucidity that everything is connected to everything else.
Carbon, Carbon Everywhere opens on the 21th of August, 2025 until 2nd of October, 2025 at Hypha HQ
©2025 Hypha HQ
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.
