For the digital performance and experience, visit gentlyopen.com.

The shutter at HH Art Spaces opened August 1st for a 29-day-long duration performance wherein Alex Xela Alphonso resides and stays in the gallery space, presenting 'Open 24/7'.

Mario D'Souza writes...

A ‘body’ at work is never simply a body performing. It is also a body that is being watched, measured, sometimes scheduled, exchanged, and/or imagined through systems that exceed it. Occupying the HH Art Spaces continuously for twenty-nine days, Alex Xela Alphonso transforms the storefront gallery into a site where domesticity, labour, performance, surveillance, and commerce enmesh, negotiate, and sit in tension. It is neither an exhibition nor a residency, neither a workplace nor a home - it is habitation in the fold between public lives and private existence. What does it mean to live inside an architecture of visibility?

The storefront window recalls the booth girl, the peep show, the cam performer, the retail display, the zoo enclosure - a (glowing screen) filter through which contemporary life watches their fantasies. Alex foregrounds the labour that precedes, survives, and often disappears behind artistic production. 

Time becomes the primary material and routines are publicly scheduled, interrupted, and occasionally surrendered to (or participated in by) others. There is no spectacular event, but  ordinary, daily rhythms of eating, resting, waiting, and working become equally performative gestures when subjected to constant visibility.

Facing the market, the storefront addresses accidental spectators as much as intentional visitors. Shopkeepers, passersby, workers, collaborators, and online viewers become participants. The exhibition unfolds through fleeting encounters, repeated glances, rumours, conversations, and digital transmissions rather than singular moments of attention. 

Open 24/7 asks - “Is visibility a form of freedom or labour?”  Does exposure produce intimacy or estrangement?

Over the course of the month, Alex is joined by her friends, lovers, and acquaintances to present daily collaborative live works that range across mediums and themes.