What Remains, Repeats
Célio Braga, Diana Blok
6 June - 4 July 2026
Opening 6th of June 16 - 19 PM
In What Remains, Repeats Diana Blok and Célio Braga bring together two practices in which time, performativity, and repetition play a central role. The title proposes a subtle shift in how time is understood. Rather than conceiving of time as something that passes and disappears, What Remains, Repeats suggests that what endures is precisely what returns—transformed, reconfigured, and re-experienced. Repetition is not presented as duplication, but as a condition of persistence: what remains does not stay fixed, but continues to unfold through variation—the movement within recurrence, making time visible. Blok presents Ménage à Trois, a series of seven performative images alongside a single related work, each in close dialogue with the others. The series reflects on the passage of time through self-portraiture, created in collaboration with the same model and artist with whom Blok explored staged photography in the 1970s and 1980s. After a long hiatus, the collaboration was renewed, introducing the skeleton as a recurring presence—conceived as the body’s final cathedral, or time’s ultimate portrait. Emerging from an inner necessity rather than artistic trends, these works explore fear and fantasy through unconventional imagery. The images subtly shift between presence and absence: in some, the artist is not physically visible, yet her gaze and awareness permeate each frame—embedded in the act of looking, in recognition, and in what time renders familiar. Braga presents a series of seven paintings composed of layered textile filaments, painted, mounted, and stitched onto canvas, alongside a suspended sculpture titled Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground. Constructed from embroidered textiles, wood, and medicine bottles, it hovers between ascent and fall, between fragility and persistence. His works reveal time as a tangible material, making process inseparable from form. In an era marked by tension, conflict, and excess noise, Braga’s practice offers a space of stillness and poetic sensitivity. The inherent slowness of his method foregrounds the density of lived time while questioning accelerated modes of production. Across both practices, time is not a backdrop but a material presence. Life and death emerge not as fixed states but as thresholds—conditions that are continually being crossed. What Remains, Repeats is an invitation to linger, to stand still long enough for time to reveal its texture.