PROGRAM

Manolo Arriola, Hanna Besenhard, Tina Daurova, Isaac De Reza, Jjjjjjerome Ellis, Dominic Gagnon, Kate Gilmore, Javier Gutiérrez Navarro, Melquiades Herrera, Matthew Hilvers, Stan Krzyzanowski, Claire Meekel, Linn Phyllis Seeger, Alfredo Salomón, Stelios Ilchuk

Smiling in Slow Motion, is a three-day video screening program that approaches what Roy Scranton calls “the end of the world as we know it” as an ongoing condition rather than a single event. This end, does not manifest itself as a sudden incident, but as a slow process towards a dooming atmosphere that we have time to embrace. Amid AI systems escaping the sandbox, engineered cyborg-cockroaches, Silicon Valley techno-messianism, contemporary aesthetics are obsessed with reversing aging, and a world where simulations replace experience, the film program asks: where do we find ourselves now? At what point in the cycle of decay are we?

The exhibition unfolds across two spaces, the Sunset Room and the Hardcore Room, in a limbo between beauty and decay. In the Sunset Room, endless photogenic sunsets glow with a familiar, almost escapist warmth while rising temperatures and a sense of looming threat. Decay can be beautiful too: like a house completely eaten by ivy. Here, the ironic and the absurd become an anchor—a kind of happy meal of video selection. The Hardcore Room looks behind the image, where cinema itself begins to unravel. Just like nitrate film—once celebrated for its exceptional visual quality, yet dangerously unstable—now survives in rotting reels. Or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, filmed and reshot in a contaminated industrial zone, turns the pursuit of the “perfect” image for cinema into one marked by poisoned landscapes and human cost in real life. Here, time loosens its grip. Slow and extended video works unfold beyond the pressure of the time, asking viewers to remain with images as they drift off, recalling Henri Bergson’s notion of duration. “Lived time” becomes another expression of the progression of decay: a time in which, even though “nothing” happens, everything changes.