The year 2022 began with Naarm/Melbourne slowly emerging from one of the world’s longest Covid-19 lockdowns. Art institutions and those who run them waited with bated breath to see how the city’s first year of “Covid normal” would unfold. Conversations at Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) to commercial galleries to Naarm/Melbourne’s monolithic National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) were filled with a cautious trepidation and their programming seemingly matched. As the world returned to a new kind of normal so too had our city but at a slower pace, one filled with fatigue.