Production of the exhibition When time no longer flows, it wells up and pools without a rim

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

The exhibition is part of a two year working process focused on the subjects of time and temporalities. While questioning the linear time, the show aims to suggest alternative temporal orders. It asks: What happens when the flow of time is dammed up and instead of passing as a river, it forms a pool instead? Would this open up new horizons from which hope could be re-establish? The need to question linear time grew out from the perception that the time of progress has made it easier to picture the collapse of the civilisation, than to imagine bringing the capitalist logic of economic growth and profit to its end. In order to remain hopeful and oriented towards what is to come, organising this exhibition is a way of taking on a small project that shows what we want to pro-ject, to through forward, into the future, even when everything around us may appear as beyond repair. This exhibition aims to underpin virtualities that are already effective in our imaginations but have not materialised in reality in order to reinvent time and temporalities. Through the artworks that it entails, the show leads attention to the fact that time can flow in different tempos sometimes passing slowly and at other times quickly; the exhibition entails artworks that use non-linear story telling; there are flash-backs, prolepsis, disruptions, delays and being in stagnation; the exhibition shows that time flows in multiple currencies; it links the human time scale to geological time scale; it asks how can we learn from the past time through anachronism; what becomes of former utopias no longer directed towards the future; what does it mean to be behind the times; what if time is running out; what if the right moment never occurs; by combining official archives with stories from unofficial sources, the artworks also show that there are many different pasts thus indicating that there can also be many different futures too, instead of a single one that the linear timeline predicts.

The project unfolded in two parts: The exhibition "When time no longer flows, it wells up and pools without a rim" was held at the ARS Project Space in Tallinn between June 17th and July 16th, 2023. It included works by artists Diego Brunio, Freja Bäckman, Piibe Kolka, Kaarina-Sirkku Kurz, and Ingel Vaikla. The exhibition "Like a Windless Cloud" was held at Hobusepea gallery in Tallinn between August 12th and September 4th, 2023. It included works by artists Touristes Tristes (Dylan Ray Arnold & Océane Bruel), Leena Kela, Kristoffer Ala-Ketola, Mika Taanila, and Shubhangi Singh, as well as a text by journalist Anton Vanha-Majamaa. Engaging diverse mediums like video, photography, sound, drawings, installations, and performance, the two exhibitions explored the nuanced concepts of time as a stretched-out continuous present.