Gallery Exit is pleased to present its latest group exhibition, ‘Why do trees grow till the end of time?’. Taking the tree as a central metaphor, the exhibition brings together both new and past works by 29 artists.

The following is the exhibition vignette:

“Why do trees grow till the end of time?”

The banyan outside the café doesn't know it's January. Doesn't know the year, the wars, the algorithms. A man inside is crying into a video call—someone's left someone, the usual geometry of departure—and the tree is doing what it did in 1997 and will do, presumably, next Tuesday.

I used to think persistence was a kind of stubbornness. Now I suspect it's closer to forgetting. The tree has forgotten to stop. Forgotten to check the news, to ask whether growth still makes sense given the circumstances. It just extends another inch of root toward the water main, cracks the pavement with the slow violence of indifference.

A woman walks past with a sign about the end of everything. The tree grows over her shadow.

This is not hope. Hope is a human sickness, a fever of the “maybe”. The tree operates below hope, in the basement of being, where the only question is: “is there light?” And if yes: “more of me, then.”

Till the end of time. As if time ends. As if the tree would notice.

We turn 18 this year. That's the shape of it, I think. The trees aren't optimists. They're just not paying attention to us. Which might be the same thing.