“This paper explores the role of public programming in challenging traditional models for knowledge production and experience in museums, by producing alternative time-zones for communities that are hosted in and out of dominant timeframes. Public programs have taken “centre stage” in museums and galleries (McDowell 2016), thus subject to debates in the curatorial field. For some public programs pull away from traditional exhibition scholarship toward entertainment to satisfy museum metrics (O’Neil 2012, McLean 2004, 209). Night-time programs have spread in institutions globally under the term “Museums Lates” (Choi et al., 2020) with talks, performances, and concerts that are seen as a marketing opportunity and economic strategy (Frey and Meier 2006). I analyse public programs’s relationship with the politics of time and criticism to account for curatorial debates and methodologies. Public programs followed the “educational turn” that saw the development of pedagogical methods (O’Neil and Wilson 2010) with the aim of developing critical understandings of exhibitions, particularly how they reinstate colonial historical time, for example in chronological displays (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). I argue that normative understanding of time can be challenged by curating public programs out of time.  I draw on Michelle Bastian’s understanding of communities’ need for shared time rather than shared space, her “antichronologies” (Bastian 2014, 150) together with the time-based nature of public programs to explore possibilities for being together otherwise—meaning differently—in opposition to dominant temporalities in the museum. Through the analysis of the project Freedom of Sleep I curated during the Covid-19 Pandemic, with public programs organised before, during and after the exhibition over a year-long period, I demonstrate the importance of alternative time-zones. This has meant slowing down institutional timeframes as well as creating new time-zones for emerging voices through an all-night program with young art critics.