This Saturday, March 1st, the gallery is holding a Closing Reception for (paradise) with performances by Insufficient Despair and Hen of the Woods. Reception starts at 6pm. Performances begin at 7pm. _ (paradise) . January 25 – March 1, 2025. Sohyong Lee, Rudik Ovsepyan, Danica Ribi, santoni kina, Keywan Tafteh, Tiago Da Cruz. Group exhibition. __ Where is paradise? Or, when is it? (Who’s there?) Who owns it? How long does it last? …. If an afterlife (paradise) is already built and bought, it is more of a material medium, a physical state—or a kind of subliminal exchange—rather than a palm-pocked destination or a celestial city. It’s a kind of realtime that builds-up in distances between a body and the limits, images, informations, imprints, mementos, processes, markets, screens, and systems that record and regulate somebody’s life and death (like a border crossing). Shaped like the hole a body leaves behind—or where it is placed. Shaped the way memory is molded into visions, things, residues: it falls away. So where does it all go? Light, memory, history, data, trauma, are all ambiguously stored by body, but what happens when they leave a body behind? Or, in the other direction, what happens when a body leaves them behind? To some extent a body holds life and death apart, and, as it gives way to gravity, more and more structures emerge in its wake: languages, photographs, archives, museums, genomes, hard-drives, cemeteries. These structures turn decay into a way of life. However, like any paradise not lost, but found (taken) and kept, they are potentially reduced to a commodity among commodities through extractive colonial enterprises that feed the living (Bios), and keep-up the good life, by repeatedly draining the dead (Necros) of their (after)life. Anyway, all this vertigo of the cadaver ends-up seeming more morbid than paradise should be. What is hopeful about paradise is that since it is something constructed it can be destroyed and rebuilt. Maybe this time it will be made for others, rather than being a way of keeping everyone else out. After all, like the hole made for the body, paradise only makes room.