July 18 -September 12, 2012
Curators: Luiza Teixeira de Freitas
Thom O'Nions
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art
Lisboa, Portugal
Artists
Alejandro Cesarco, Henrik Håkansson, Runo Lagomarsino, Edgar Martins, Katja Mater, Matt Mullican, Joao Onofre, Lisa Oppenheim, Philomene Pirecki, Dieter Roth, Lisa Tan, Jack Vickridge, Lawrence Weiner, Guido Van Der Werve
The exhibition brings together a set of artworks that deal with ways of embedding time, either as a conceptual proposition or within the process of making the artwork itself. Time is rendered by the artwork, produced through it. In Archive Fever Derrida remarks that the process of archivisation ‘produces as much as it records the event’, this is an idea that can be put to many of the works in the exhibition. Through attending to time and its representation they produce their own forms of the present, existing discreetly within themselves and within the context of the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition is taken from Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness, which flits between two time periods, events take place in the sedately paced 18th century and a hurried, more fragmented present day. Kundera’s narrative however is written entirely in the present tense, it weaves together temporal and geographical space, the act of narration and the subject of the narrative seemingly occur at the same time. This is an idea that runs through the exhibition, the artworks are a simultaneity of times and speeds that occur in different registers and locations yet taking place within the temporal and physical frame of the gallery.
The exhibition revolves around a series of questions, brought about by the interaction of ideas of time and of speed; how do we define the speed of a work of art? Does a work dictate its own pace, or is its pace imposed upon it by a viewer? Can an exhibition be conceived of as a collection of relative speeds?
Marinetti maintained in his Manifesto of Aeropainting that the act of being in a plane could in itself be an artwork, an ‘aerosculpture’ formed through a ‘harmonious and signifying composition of coloured smokes offered to the brushes of dawn and dusk, and long vibrant beams of electric light’. The assertion that movement in itself constitutes an artwork when framed in a certain way aptly expresses the relationship between time, speed and movement that the exhibition explores.