“How do I pitch this to the 800-pound gorillas? Let me attempt: Back for sloppy seconds? Yes, there’s still more McDonald’s to be devoured at home…” My freestyling ended here, so my brain could take another breath to come up with something better.

Yu instantly questioned why I was keen on producing a continuation to the “We Have McDonald’s at Home” concept.

“Babe, I get it, there’s like more artworks, ephemera, whatever, in your possession, and you want the quick cash grab. I feel like… Listen, it feels like you’re repeating yourself, this is filler, like the bad kind… We get it, you’re surprisingly connected and pretentious basement dwellers – what else? I doubt the first show was suggesting anything less. Baby, I’m sorry, but I need to be candid, there’s enough fast food art in this city.”

“I mean, yeah, it’s superfluous – that’s by design. You’re right, and yeah, it’s a greasy show, greasy in a much different manner to the first one, a total cash grab as you said. That’s kind of the point, we’re turning the framework in on itself… And… Eh, you know, it’s about…”

“Of course, but girl, is that really all you’re after? You’re bringing ice to Arctic” Yu cut me off.

“What do you mean??? Girl, let me finish! I concede, you’re right, it’s vapid in a sense, but it’s not FILLER!!! (What the fuck, everyone knows better than me nowadays? You didn’t even know who Andrea Fraser was, the last time we had our stupid little crit.)

“If it’s all shit in your eyes, then perhaps that’s what you deserve, we serve you a plate, no, red plastic tray of hot shit.”

“Bubu, did I bother you?” Yu consoled me with that infuriatingly ambiguous delivery, I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or trying to be apologetic. “Vers, you know I love you, I’m just being honest.”

I checked out after that comment and drifted to another time and place, a bleak continuum in which my residency permit finally would not be renewed. Against all my will to remain in my cozy patch work family, I was stuck, yet about to be kicked out from a country with notoriously high walls for anyone lacking the right papers and proportionally harsh punishment for refusing to obey the laws claiming my stay as illegal. (Law should be held to the sense of the time and remain a flexible logic, not something bound to the eternity of the word [whatever that means].)

In this continuum I had to quietly relocate to a morgue. Although “had to” might be overstating the external factor; a decision was made. The morgue: It’s not too different after all, living or dead, we all can appreciate the comfort of a body bag and all deserve in my view the routines prescribed by an institution for the passive.

A month passed and the thought of waking up tomorrow to keep surviving like this (more or less comfortably in my chosen grave) bred a brain-grinding dread in my head. As I lay there, I felt covered in dust for the first time. As I began to move for an unknown reason, I felt my legs and booty aching, while my head was numb, of course. To hell with the morgue. That night, while the morticians were asleep, I followed the self-illuminating little figure exiting its green hell, escaping by-the-books back to my former home.

I couldn’t muster up the courage to see Yu and Gabi. I waited around the corner in the dark until our powder-pal neighbor went on his nightly run for new supply, leaving the door to the apartment building ajar. I snuck in, snuck in disgust, went right down to the basements, the ones that housed my interior life for the past half a decade, with its wooden partitions and cheap locks storing my thoughts far more than any material belongings. I must have spent no more than ten minutes there before hearing the neighbor return in the dead of the night, quickly and forcefully stomping up the stairs, as if to shake snow off his feet. It was August. All these weird memories. “Girl, I need a smoke before I cry,” I said out loud in the presence of nobody.

Anyways, back in this continuum, Stef, Roli, and I are delighted to present “We Have McDonald’s at Home Again,” a group exhibition and sequel to our earlier 2026 show, “We Have McDonald’s at Home.” Bringing together a diverse collection of artworks and ephemera plucked from various contexts, the exhibition features works and (mostly involuntary) contributions by Benedikt Bock, Andrea Bowers, KP Brehmer, Jason Dodge, Vers Dor, Daniel Kurth, Marion Ritzmann, Dorian Sari, Tino Sehgal, and Anna Soz.

I have a few gallery exhibitions in mind that exploit the logic of sequels. Not naming names, but they function in a particular way: grouping works, constipating them in the name of a theme, herding them under a title, pairing them with a regional wine. I’m talking about fat cat blue-chip galleries, not your local weirdos. H&W for example put on some shows that are stupid and stink like Swiss cheese—though I unashamedly love me some Gruyère—and still you have to decide how you would like to be perceived, since the longer you wallow in these shows, the stronger and longer the protein-decaying stench will linger in your clothing. The situation around continuations, of parts 2, 3, and 4 (even if oftentimes not proclaimed in such an obvious manner) in the contemporary art setting, is not discussed nearly enough. But it seems to reek of the exact same pro(mo)blematics and motives for a sequel that drive the “low-brow” entertainment side of cultural production. Capital prefers the cash grab, a guaranteed IP, something recognizable. Experimentation is always a risk, and art-as-business cannot sustain itself on that, since true innovation in art art (not art-as-business) lacks the market drive found in other fields.

Here is the mantra: Sequel, sequence, sequester, sequacious. (repeat x 5)

A sequel is how something is instated, hence reinstated, and drawn as traditional, as nature. The same thing repeated, and during repetition framed as repetition, even if it bears a “part 2,” “the resurrection,” or “2 Fast 2 Furious,” offers not a straightforward continuation, but a reliance on the familiar and an irredeemable promise for a first-time high. A mechanism that wants you to fall for “Jurassic World Rebirth” and keep chasing and racing the dragon to RuPaul’s ninth season and beyond, while internally knowing you’re not fifteen anymore. (Though in secret you still believe in the dragon, not sure if the powder was KitKat, speed, peace, coke, piss, some at-the-time legal lab drug, or some mixture of all of the above.) That’s what your local dealer feeds his family from, kids! So stay away from those narratives; always be keen to rub your nose with the certainty that the feeling you experienced snorting that off-white laxative from your crooked-toothed teen boyfriend’s iPhone 5s will never be recreated, and seek a better experience. (I imagine with clarity that Marc has the iPhone 17 Pro by now.) They’re selling you regurgitation—garbage with rhinestones. The state of sequels has always been a complicated one.

Cooking a tray of lasagna, cut into eight pieces, eating it day after day by reheating the tray to take a piece at a time for lunch: with every reheating, the hint of questioning the substance you’re ingesting becomes more prominent. The eighth piece—I mustn’t tell you—tastes like nothing of the initial ingredients, but reminds you of vegan cheese (not that this means anything). F8 with The Rock zooted out on TRT and peptides while proclaiming to be natty; I don’t even want to imagine his cycles, his ass looking like an acupuncture testing ground. Side tangent: Actually, seeing The Rock on every bus stop advertisement, his body secretly propagates trans-supremacy, though it’s only obfuscated by commercial hetero-tropes that the average consumer gladly reads as strengthening the heteronarrative. Those blockbuster remakes of remakes The Rock lends his image to are just lasagna reheated eight times.- I ask myself: What we’re consuming at this point? Dare I say the word, trendy as all hell, and a term which has become a demonstrative in recent writing: slop, sloppy slop, sloppidy sloppy slop. Let’s call this sequel slop…

“Baby, get a grip” Yu shouted across the room.

I miss them.