t’s not the future seeping into the present. There is no future at the moment. Nor is it hauntology. It’s not a memorial for futures past. We’re in a sideways time, where time rambles and gets lost. It’s a dissociated time, but not just as felt in this body. It is history itself as dysphoric, as unable to settle into its own body—metabolic rift.
Mackenzie Wark, Raving. 2023
“Afters” occur between the end of the party and the beginning of whatever follows it. It is the space and time where curated parameters dissolve: the club closes, the hosts ask us to leave, and we end up in the middle of the street, maybe waiting for something to happen, maybe listening to quiet music out of someone’s cell phone. Afters are foggy versions of productive being, somewhere inside and outside the sequence of morning, afternoon, night, train, home, office. There is harshness when stepping out, when the sunglasses come on, returning from afters into “being.” Of course, this is relative.
Taken abstractly, away from the specificity of the party context, “afters” are occasions to think about spaces and states of being between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. It suggests the prolongation of ecstasy, and stasis in time. Spiraling, stillness, and seizure. In “afters,” you say “see you tomorrow” referring to what may be today. Inside afters, a private space becomes public, or a public space becomes private. They are framings that usually occur spontaneously, and performatively.
This group exhibition explores “afters” not just as the after-party space, but as a methodology for thinking about occasions where space and time take on porous and ambiguous meaning. Where the hours may flatten, and the walls swell. When the institution becomes a nightclub, the gallery a living room, the train platform a bathroom. The works interpret post-rave as a methodology for thinking generally about when time, space, and understanding of oneself suspend, collapse, and swell.
For the final group show at The RYDER Projects location on Miguel Servet 13, we celebrate the gallery’s move to Tribunal with a group exhibition devoted to the ways community transcends physical location, performativity shapes space, and bodies co-create culture. Artistic positions spanning video, installation, sculpture, performance, prints, and photography each propose a visual language for liminal environments that are formed spontaneously and collectively. With works dated from 1996–2025 by contemporary practitioners from Spain and beyond, afters offers a snapshot of one of the pressing issues of our time: how do we describe time/space dissociations, and the communal pulsations that circumvent them?
