War does not end when the fighting stops. It persists in people’s traumas, in the ruins of cities, in the absence of those who are no longer there, and in scorched landscapes. At the same time, the possibility of the repetition of war continues to produce new threats, new conflicts, and expectations of their resolution. ...and over again is a project of the homeless and timeless gallery One Night Stands, presented in New York in August 2026. It brings together several artistic gestures concerned with war, the fear of escalation, violence, vulnerability, and the limited capacity of art to respond to these conditions.

The exhibition brings together Nikolay Karabinovych, the duo Velvet Acronyms (Anna Li and Simon Raven) and Alexey Samarin. Their practices are distinct, but their works meet through the way simple artistic gestures encounter historical circumstances that exceed their scale. Nikolay Karabinovych is an Odesa-born artist whose practice draws on the traditions of Odesa Conceptualism and the aesthetics of Mladen Stilinović, particularly their engagement with language, cultural clichés, music, and political signs. His drawing The war is over and over again, which gives the exhibition its title, can be read as a gesture of repetition. It's an image that reflects the seemingly endless wait for the war in Ukraine to end, and at the same time, a bitter irony about the world leaders' obsessive attempts to declare it over again, despite the fact that the war continues to persist...

For One Night Stands' exhibition, the drawing by Karabinovych was attached to a suitcase and carried through New York. This did not alter the work itself, but changed the conditions of its exhibition: the drawing left the wall and became a portable fragment appearing in different locations across the city. The suitcase implies both movement and temporariness — departure, return, and the possibility of another journey. Once placed in the United States, in August 2026, the work could also acquire another, more immediate reading: in the American context, its simple formula can be understood in relation to the repeated political promises to bring wars to an end, from Ukraine to the conflict with Iran.

Alexey Samarin also approaches waiting and war but through the gradual disappearance of the human image. Samarin is a post-conceptual artist based in Kuala Lumpur whose practice examines algorithms and our relationship to machine-generated knowledge, in particular the nature of our trust in systems whose operations we cannot fully see or verify. For this work, he uses the American educational film Duck and Cover (1952), produced during the Cold War to teach schoolchildren how to respond to a nuclear attack. The film is processed by two neural networks: one recognises the objects and figures within the image, while the other removes what has been identified, replacing it with the background. The process is repeated until the algorithm can no longer recognise anything.

But the work is not simply about nuclear war or artificial intelligence. Samarin places the human image in a peculiar state of superposition: it continues to exist for the human viewer while disappearing from machine perception. If the human being is the subject who normally looks at and interprets an image, here the situation is reversed: the image potentially outlives the human. The nuclear catastrophe represented by the 1952 film becomes a possible future in which the human has disappeared while the algorithm continues to operate. The work was viewed on a phone while exercising on a cardio machine in a New York sports club. The body continues its repetitive movement while the human world gradually disappears from the screen. The Cold War is thus brought into contact with contemporary technological infrastructure and an ordinary routine. Repetition becomes a form of disappearance, but it also concerns trust: we repeatedly delegate acts of seeing and recognition to machines, accepting their classifications without necessarily knowing how they are produced.

For Velvet Acronyms, repetition takes the form of a physical encounter with an established artistic symbol. Anna Li, an artist from Odesa who moved to Nottingham following the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and British artist Simon Raven from Newcastle work as a duo within the tradition of the British Disabled Avant-Garde. Their practice employs crip humour, absurdity, parody, and exaggeration to question ableist structures and established forms of representing disability.

In the video presented in New York, Anna Li drives her wheelchair over a banana — an object that, following Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, has become one of the most recognisable and simultaneously absurd symbols of contemporary art. The gesture is deliberately simple: the wheel passes over the banana. An artistic symbol encounters the body; an iconic contemporary-art object becomes physically vulnerable; and the wheelchair is no longer an object to be represented but an instrument of action. The comic character of the gesture does not neutralise its political dimension, but provides a means of addressing artistic conventions, the body, and vulnerability through absurdity.

The format of One Night Stands allows the exhibition to exist without a fixed location: in a suitcase, on a phone, on a laptop, in a sports club, inside a Manhattan skyscraper, and across the streets of New York. The works do not physically meet. Their encounter takes place between different routes, screens, bodies, and situations. The exhibition therefore refuses to assemble its works into a single stable whole. Its fragmentation is consequently not merely formal. War also reaches us in fragments: messages, photographs, maps, short videos, political statements, and images of destruction. It is simultaneously distant and embedded in everyday life. The exhibition responds through several small gestures. And again: waiting for the war to end. And again: looking at an image. And again: running the algorithm. And again: returning to an artistic symbol that appears already exhausted. Until it becomes unclear what exactly is being repeated: the artwork, the war, the image, or the expectation of their ending.