The Late Shop is a venue where it is impossible to browse and buy things with money. Instead, the shop uses time as the currency or means of exchange. The Late Shop uses delays, slowness, and vulnerable reflection to introduce an aesthetic and ethical vision for a new quiet economy. Not only as a diagnosis of our present but also as an amelioration framework for the future (regarding resources and labour).

During the exhibition period, visitors will be able to engage with our space as a boutique of sorts, where the interiors, actions, and objects all together reimagine economic exchange – potentialising new routes for engaging in future trading situations.

Here, the vision for creating or producing new exchange behaviours will occur by reconfiguring how we visualise and experience value, time, and economic hierarchies in trade situations. To activate these ideas, the artists have designed parallel economic and social experiments to offer potential “customers” new and highly considered forms of exchange.

The artists reflect on how the experiences of the world’s major crises and landslides of change have created a new focus on how we invest our time. In this sense, The Late Shop aims to enable a new psychology of interaction, with the benefit of critical delays and slowdowns, and looks to imagine in scale how these can translate to larger communities affected by massive changes.

More precisely, The Late Shop looks to challenge value-based conventions to help start a dialogue on how to rethink radical materialism and consumption behaviours. In practice, it aims to make this happen by providing a space to explore our automatic relations to the transaction and the transacted. To this end, the art space becomes an exchange experimentarium. In particular, the artists are creating sharp but contemplative experiences for visitors that use time as a currency to expand our relational awareness through these experiments, and open new ceremonial approaches to exchange via new thinking on critical austerities, recessions, and drawdowns. The shop, as a site available to our visitors, our future ‘customers’, to explore awareness and trust through empathic economies, is therefore a space to research what critical prosperity could be.

With all this in mind, the artists wish to start a conversation about how we can rethink the repetitive, mundane, and capitalised relationships, productions, or services of routine trade—thinking about how critical delay, generosity, and practice can help to reimagine them. And as such, hoping that participants in this shop will gain, from these artistically designed pauses, a snapshot of a potential logic between ceremony, the expectation of value, and a new focus on how we invest our time.

On the Making of The Late Shop

The Late Shop is a collaboration initiated in early 2020 that combines the individual practices of Line Sandvad Mengers, Lise Tovesdatter Skou and Hannah Toticki, who share interests in time, economy and politics of identity. In addition to a long-term dedication to the concept of value. Each artist has developed participatory approaches in their works and explored the body as a carrier of art. The Late Shop as a new exhibition marks the first time artists Line Sandvad Mengers, Hanna Toticki, and Lise Tovesdatter Skou collaborate, and the three artists have together conceived the entire premise of this new exhibition project.