Drawing from the idea of utopia not as a fixed destination but as something unstable and imperfect, Passerby explores the shared history of Ruvan Wijesooriya and Nick Zinner within New York City’s early 2000s underground music scene, before everything became content. Focusing on moments where time briefly shifts, a concert, a crowded room, the afters that never fully end, the exhibition traces fleeting instances where proximity replaces distance and experience exceeds documentation.
The title Passerby is borrowed from the former bar of the same name, a legendary extension of Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York once frequented by artists, musicians, and downtown weirdos. First presented in Honolulu in 2023, Athens marks the exhibition’s second iteration.
Through an accumulation of over 1000 photographs, Passerby brings together more than two decades of an underground scene, acting as an archive of something that never stayed still.
