Nearly a decade ago, Petzel presented We Need to Talk: Artists and the Public Respond to the Present Conditions in America, an exhibition shaped by political rupture and the uneasy sense that what followed might still be reversible. Opening in January 2017, it captured a moment of collective alarm – when a shifting national and global order still felt reversible.

LOUCHE: Sleeping Through the Apocalypse emerges from the long shadow of that moment. What once registered as fear has hardened into lived reality. The years since – marked by political upheaval, ecological crisis, pandemic, and a violent challenge to democratic continuity – have not only confirmed earlier anxieties but exceeded them. If the earlier exhibition was driven by urgency, this one settles into exhausted lucidity.

This exhibition is not about resistance, nor critique in any familiar sense, but staged indifference: a farce in which cultural production continues unabated as the conditions that sustain it erode. The exhibition performs a deliberate slackening of critical posture — a surrender to spectacle, excess, and dissonance that mirrors a broader social anesthesia. We feared too for our little ivory towers, built over a decade of global expansion in a relatively stable art world. How foolish we were.

To be “louche” is to drift in moral ambiguity, at the edge of clarity and propriety. Humor curdles into menace and seduction gives way to fatigue. The exhibition does not try to awaken its viewers, but implicates them. We recognize the stakes, yet persist in forms of attention increasingly inadequate to them.

Louche offers no exit. It lingers around the limits of imagination—what we failed to foresee, what we have come to accept, and what it might mean to remain awake, if waking is still possible.

Artists include:

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