Long Story Short

Long story short. To cut to the chase. In short. Summed up. TL;DR. Everyday language is permeated by small markers of an equally simple and fundamental question: How do we tell each other things? And, following from this: How do we listen to one another in the process? How do we distribute our attention, and how do we perceive our surroundings in the first place? The nine artists in the self-organized group exhibition Long Story Short approach these questions through the lens of the English idiom, each from within the specific logic of their chosen medium. What they share is a particular attentiveness toward the everyday: their neighborhoods, domestic spaces, urban environments, and interpersonal encounters. They have something to tell, but they keep it concise. This principle of reduction forms the foundation of the exhibition: “Complex experiences are condensed, the unnecessary omitted, and focus directed toward what is essential.” While Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, sought to structure everyday popular culture through its (status) symbols, Long Story Short shifts attention toward the incidental and peripheral—the small details, materials, and fleeting moments that often escape notice. Yet these works also reveal underlying structures of power and codes of behavior, asking who is granted access to and ownership of public space. Through painting, sculpture, and sound, the artists capture seemingly casual moments, but their approach is anything but documentary or descriptive. Through deliberate interventions, they introduce shifts and distortions that alter perception and meaning, opening up new readings of the familiar. Small observations become fragments of larger narratives, allowing viewers, in the encounter between different works, to trace connections and recurring motifs. Long Story Short thus becomes a gesture of condensation, omission, and absence. Stories are only briefly sketched; what emerges instead is the narrative potential contained within seemingly insignificant, everyday moments. At the same time, through the displacement—the glitches—of codes and patterns, a political dimension of Long Story Short becomes visible: the underlying economy of attention that, under the conditions of accelerated capitalism, seeks to compress everything into its most efficient form and save as much time as possible. We live in a moment when apps offer condensed versions of the great classics of literature, reducing complex, meandering reading experiences into easily digestible fragments. After all, time is money. Too long, didn’t read. To undermine this neoliberal logic is to recall that storytelling has always depended on subjective perspectives, on the elaboration of the smallest details that suddenly become the most significant. That the oral transmission of knowledge shaped human history for centuries, passed from generation to generation. That every perspective is individual, and that we are all unreliable narrators. That the detours and deviations of a story are often where its true appeal lies. In her manifesto Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell describes the glitch as “a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance”—a means of resistance, a strategy of refusing to perform. Starting from the concept of the glitch as an error within machines and digital systems, she expands it into a strategy for embodied, sensory life: “a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of gender as something stationary.” In a similar way, the works in Long Story Short challenge viewers to discover mutable narratives within them—to encounter stories that remain open, shifting, and continuously rewritten.