Waiting is often seen as empty time — a delay between meaningful actions. In his essay On Waiting, Giovanni Gasparini challenges this view, describing waiting as a distinct temporal condition shaped by expectation, perception, and social structures. 

Waiting can first appear as a blockage of action: agency is suspended, time stretches, and frustration reveals hidden power dynamics. Yet waiting may also become filled with substitute activities — reading, travelling, drifting in thought — layering anticipation with distraction. Most importantly, Gasparini frames waiting as a threshold: a space of preparation and transformation in which identity and expectation gradually shift.

This temporal condition is increasingly under pressure. In The Ecology of Attention, Yves Citton argues that modern technologies fragment attention and erode moments of stillness, with the result that nothing seems to have a clear beginning or end anymore. Attention, he suggests, is never neutral; it involves a deliberate form of estrangement that can be transformative.        

Similarly, in The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han describes contemporary temporality as accelerated and directionless, stripped of rhythm, pauses, and closure. Waiting and silence, Han argues, can feel alienating; yet it is precisely by embracing this estrangement that waiting becomes a site of reflection and transformation.

This programme translates these ideas into experience. It begins with works that present waiting as suspension, then moves toward pieces that reflect the merging and acceleration of time in modern life. It concludes by emphasizing waiting as meaningful preparation and transformation. By varying pacing and atmosphere, the exhibition invites you not only to think about waiting, but to feel it. Maybe waiting is a more attentive, conscious way of inhabiting time.