AUB Art Galleries in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
More about the exhibition
With: Kristina Benjocki, Diana Hakobyan, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Peter Fengler, Daniele Genadry, Walid Sadek, Rayyane Tabet, Esmé Valk, and Cynthia Zaven
Curators: Angela Harutyunyan and Nat Muller
This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time takes its cue from Laurie Anderson’s ominous 1982 song From the Air where she describes the duration between becoming conscious that the plane will crash and its actual impact. This is a moment when time and space collapse; when the machine, the body, and geographic coordinates of where you are at a given moment in the world are lost. This is the time when an abyss opens up of accelerated thought, where past, present and future collide in a reality that is turned topsy-turvy. More than anything else, it represents the ultimate loss of control, over time or anything else for that matter.
The idea of feeling lost in mid-air and nose-diving towards imminent disaster resonates in our era, characterized as it is by the perpetual reproduction of crisis, be that economical, political, social, ecological or personal. While we can share our daily events to a degree that was not possible before, we seem to have less power over the course that the world is taking. Although we are constantly exposed to the various histories in the making, because of the incessant news feeds, social media and other recording devices we might understand less of our current times as we become overloaded with information. Events play out in real-time, we have them at our fingertips, but does that really help shed light on our current condition? Angela Harutyunyan and Nat Muller suggest that we are in dire need of reconsidering how we experience, record and historicize our times.
This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time activates different temporalities and calls on us to pause and reflect, even if only for a moment. The artists in the exhibition investigate the extent to which the recording mechanisms and material recordings of our lived times shape our notions of temporality– both world historical and that of the art world.
This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time is part of the Stedelijk Museum’s Global Collaborations program in partnership with AUB Art Galleries. The exhibition and its newly commissioned works premiered at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam in September 2014.
Public Events
March 25, 8pm – Artist’s Talk, Sebastian Diaz Morales, at The Mansion, Zoqaq el-Blat, Abdulqader street, near the Solitaire building
March 26, 8:00pm – Peter Fengler, performance, building 37, behind the old Lee Observatory, the AUB campus
March 27-28, 10:00-5:30pm - Thinking About Time, Conference AUB, College Hall, Auditorium B1
Art historians, philosophers, artists, art critics and media theorists have been invited to engage with the complex question of temporality (be that abstract, historical or achronic).
What does it mean to live in a world where the perpetual production of various crises defines the present historically and politically? Does the overproduction of temporal records through mass and social media, imaging devices and digital technologies truly capture the spirit of the time? Does the contemporary world of accelerated experience allow us to understand the core of what structures experience? How does the temporality of late capitalist modernity shape or unshape historical consciousness?
Speakers: Vardan Azatyan, Bassam El-Baroni, Jelle Bouwhuis, Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Fares Chalabi, Clare Davis, Rico Franses, Ursula Frohne, Muhannad Hariri, John H. Hartle, Sami Khatib, Eric Kluitenberg, Aras Ozgun, Kirsten Scheid, Brian William Rogers
May 13, 6:00 pm - Guided Tour of the exhibition