“Sonic Histories: Passerby” at The Intermission – Exploring the shared history of Ruvan Wijesooriya and Nick Zinner

The exhibition revisits fleeting experiences: a concert, a crowded room, a conversation that lingers, the space between sound and bodies, and after-hours gatherings that seem never to end.

The Intermission presents the ongoing programme Sonic Histories, an initiative that explores oral traditions and cultural histories preserved, transmitted, or embedded through music. Bringing together academics, musicians, artists, and theorists, the programme creates a shared space for interdisciplinary exchange.

On Thursday, July 2, 2026, at 19:00, Passerby, a photography exhibition by Ruvan Wijesooriya and Nick Zinner, will open at Castor Place in Piraeus. The exhibition traces the artists’ shared history within New York City’s underground music scene of the early 2000s, a period often remembered through Meet Me in the Bathroom and the fleeting allure of indie sleaze, before everything became content.

Curated by Vasileia Kagka, Passerby draws on the idea of utopia not as a fixed destination but as something unstable, imperfect, and temporary. The exhibition focuses on moments when time seems to shift, when something feels as though it might last, even if only for a single night. Through photographs, it revisits ephemeral experiences: concerts, crowded rooms, conversations stretching into the early hours, the charged space between sound and bodies, and after-parties that never seem to end.

These moments are fleeting, yet significant. They are instances when something else becomes possible, when proximity replaces distance, individuals dissolve into something collective, and lived experience exceeds its documentation.

Utopia happens there. Not as permanence, but as rupture.

The title Passerby is borrowed from the legendary bar of the same name, an extension of Gavin Brown’s gallery on 15th Street between 8th and 9th Avenue in New York, once frequented by artists, musicians, and the downtown scene’s various outsiders. Originally conceived as a travelling exhibition, with different curators reassembling the material in each city, Passerby was first presented in Honolulu in 2023. Athens marks its second stop.

Through hundreds of photographs spanning more than two decades, the exhibition assembles an archive of an underground scene that was constantly evolving. Wijesooriya documented the formation of downtown New York’s emerging music culture as it unfolded, while Zinner photographed life on tour and behind the scenes, moving through the same environments as an active participant.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the tension between presence and absence. These photographs capture moments that were never meant to last, yet persist as traces. Here, utopia is not something one arrives at; it is something one passes through. It exists only while it is happening, in the space between people, in the overlap of sound and image, in the brief suspension of everything outside it. And then it disappears.