The Sunsets were Purple and Red and Yellow and on Fire
24.Jan – 02.May.26

This exhibition brings together works by Charbel Alkhoury, Klein, Zein Majali, Alison Nguyen, Valentin Noujaïm, Tanat Teeradakorn and Jacob Schoolmeesters, examining how people and communities grapple with the void left behind by futures long lost. Loaded with cultural references spanning multiple temporal and spatial geographies, the works on show explore the collision of personal and collective memories, and ways in which they continue to haunt the present — obstructing our ability to look forward.

Amid hypernormalisation, fake news, polarization, brainrot, state violence, live-streamed atrocities, and the overall devastating realities of our current era, we find ourselves lured into the quicksand of nostalgia — a “desire to live in a future to a past that history sliced off, leaving its scar.” (McKenzie Wark). This pull toward the past takes the form of phantom nostalgia: a desire for something never experienced, or that existed only as a promise, yet which continues to exert a powerful hold on the present. Entangled with hauntology — the persistence of futures that never came to be — this condition produces a pervasive sense of dissociation and alienation.

The works on show give shape to this disorientation through fractured and feverish dreamscapes unfolding across moving image, storytelling and music. Often staged against urban ruins — a symbol to societal collapse — the artists’ protagonists turn to subcultures, pre-colonial realities, orally transmitted anecdotes and urban legends in search of meaning amidst the senseless. Time no longer moves forward in a straight line, but stutters, returns, and loops into itself in a perpetual cycle. Within these repetitions, the ghosts that linger are not merely residues of loss, but potential portals — spectral openings through which we might learn, recalibrate, and imagine otherwise.