Downtime Parlor

Downtime Parlor looks at the aftermath of political intensity not as a rupture but as what lingers, as an affective field that persists, a time inhabited rather than left behind. Extending beyond its bounded moment, the event slips into other registers: exhaustion, negotiations, and the daily recalibrations of living together and apart. This aftermath (if it can even be called so) is one woven from small narratives and micro-gestures, from cruel optimisms and crueller disappointments, from provisional alignments, from pauses and repetitions that defy tidy arcs. To remain here is to attend to what has not ended (well)—not in nostalgia for what once assembled, nor in the consolations of narrative coherence—but to dwell in the unfinished without demanding that it be made whole. Convened around the works of five artists and two groups, the exhibition considers in quieter times the tentative, the insistently minor; it is less a performance of politics than an ongoing rehearsal, where pauses, returns or improvised forms of continuity take centre stage.