a radical intimacy of hanging out: Asma Khoory, Taqwa Alnaqbi, Sultan Al Remeithi

The Gulf is no stranger to velocity—its landscapes recalibrated at breakneck speed, its past folded into the scaffolding of an imagined future. But amidst the steel and shimmer, a quieter, slower act endures: a radical intimacy of hanging out. To ‘kill time’ is a phrase at once violent and tender, implying destruction while paradoxically emphasising care for oneself.

In the accelerated logic of Gulf urbanism, time is a currency spent, traded, or wasted. The GCC Collective’s philosophies on Gulf Futurism capture this dissonance, where human existence often feels like an exchange of value—optimised and monetised. Yet, against this backdrop, ‘killing time’ persists as an unregulated terrain, a temporal pause that insists on the worthiness of presence over productivity. What emerges in these spaces is a playground of shared cigarettes over gossip baked in shadowed corners, codified memes exchanged like borrowed clothes, and endless retellings of half-finished stories passed around and fragmented.

At its core, these artists ponder if time is genuinely killed when it is steeped in presence or whether these moments resist the finality implied in their passing. These often-dismissed observations reveal fractures in our understanding of time: fleeting and enduring, communal and isolating, generous and selfish.

“a radical intimacy of hanging out” invites viewers to consider how time is exchanged, shared, or withheld, and whether reclaiming it can lead to a more profound reckoning with what it means to linger in an age of velocity. We invite you to observe, chatter, and perhaps reevaluate hanging out as a radical reclaiming of time itself.