LOUCHE: Sleeping Through the Apocalypse emerges from the long shadow of Petzel's 2017 exhibition We Need to Talk, staging a deliberately slackened critical posture in response to a decade of political upheaval, ecological crisis, pandemic, and democratic erosion. Where its predecessor was driven by urgency, this exhibition settles into exhausted lucidity — not resistance or critique but performed indifference, a farce in which cultural production continues as the conditions sustaining it erode. To be louche is to drift in moral ambiguity. The exhibition does not try to awaken its viewers but implicates them, lingering at the limits of imagination and asking what it might mean to remain awake, if waking is still possible.
Featuring work by Yael Bartana, Cosima von Bonin, Simon Denny, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Carroll Dunham, Keith Edmier, Nikita Gale, Philip Guston, Keith Haring, Martin Kippenberger, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Sean Landers, Malcolm Morley, Philippe Parreno & Pierre Huyghe, Joyce Pensato, Seth Price, Peter Saul, Pieter Schoolwerth, Amy Sillman, Dana Schutz, Harold Stevenson, Nicola Tyson, Raphaela Vogel
