A4 Arts Foundation
17.12 - 20.04.2023
The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote, “By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.” Time as a concept, then, is an exaggeration — a dramatic attempt to describe human perception. It is one of many ways to organise life, a transcendental design of history that prevents things from co-happening. Capable of being worn, cloaked, projected, travelled, measured, kept and felt, time is imbricated in human experience.
The group exhibition, The Future is Behind Us curated by Josh Ginsburg at A4 Arts Foundation brings together twelve artists who fiddle with the rhythms of time and its regulation. The show challenges our temporal anchoring and suggests that what we see ahead of us might actually be what has already passed. The exaggeration here, to go back to Ortega y Gasset, is in how every object — worn shoes, silver-plated spoons, teapots, gravy boats, mirrors, paper and paint — transcends its function to symbolically consider the workings of time.
Mitchell Messina, Play for Artworks, 2022. Courtesy of A4.
In one sense, the entire exhibition could be read as a dematerialisation of objects, in so far as it moves us towards an analysis of abstraction as defined by Liam Gillick. In his 2011 essay “Abstract,” he writes that to abstract is to create a reductive gesture or environment. Such an environment deploys a material in a manner that unbalances it in relation to its objectness. That is to say, some measure of the probability that the thing exists as itself becomes questionable. Each of these everyday objects becomes a gesture of rupture, sometimes slowing time (Naama Tsabar), arresting time (Santu Mofokeng) or squeezing it (Gian Maria Tosatti).
In Kader Attia’s installation, Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009), cooked couscous is used as an understructure for a model of the ancient city of Ghardaïa in the Algerian M’zab Valley. Accompanied by portraits of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, French architect Fernand Pouillon as well as a printout of the UNESCO Advisory Body Evaluation of the M’zab Valley as a world heritage site, the construction tacitly emphasises French-Algerian histories. It signals the corrosive order of colonisation through the ubiquity of European modernist architecture and its influence on the North African built environment. Perhaps the work is a reminder of colonisation’s tendency to simultaneously cannibalise and annihilate – and, in that process, rewrite histories, including the fundamental rituals of time observed by ancient cultures. The work itself marks the passage of time through transience, precarity and decay suggested by the slowly disintegrating couscous.
Installation view: The Future Is Behind Us, 2022-2023. (Left) Jo Ractliffe, N1: every 100 kilometres, 1996-1999 and (right) Khader Attia, Untitled (Guardaïa), 2009. Courtesy of A4.
Ian Wilson’s Set of Four from Sect.20 (1972), a work of typed and handwritten text on paper and tape, reveals his interest in the dematerialisation of form. The work introduces doubt through a series of slightly varying decrees:
that the unknown is known is both known and unknown.
that the known is unknown is both known and unknown.
that the unknown is unknown is both known and unknown.
These slippages in language invalidate confidence in the idea of knowledge, echoing Tarik Yildirim’s reflections that “time as a flow constantly evolves and evades complete spatialisation, always remaining partially in the dark, in the domain of the unknown.”
James Webb, Prayer, 2000-ongoing. Courtesy of A4.
James Webb’s over 20-year-long project, Prayer (2000–ongoing), speaks much more directly to time. The multi-channel sound installation comprises recordings of prayers spanning multiple religions from ten cities across the world, played together for the first time in this exhibition. Through Prayer, Webb is not just marking time, but also marking space – or rather, turning time into space. Described by Kathryn Smith in her essay “Shadow Signals” published in the artist’s monograph …, as “emblematic of [Webb’s] desire to identify and engage the meshworks of difference and recognition,” the work creates a dialogue by offering a moment of pause for reflection. The viewer’s experience of the work depends on where they choose to place their body in relation to the speakers laid out on the carpet. Prayer can be experienced as a singular moment or as a cacophony of speaking and singing voices passing through.
What was confusing to me, conceptually, was the inclusion of Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991) which consists of two mirrors (150 x 195 cm) that sit side by side. Reaching for the exhibition booklet that details a conversation between Yildirim and Ginsburg for clarity yielded no results. Yildirim provokes: “Think of yourself as a mirror. What remains at the back, in the dark part? Your mind, your thoughts? What appears to others in the front of the glass? Your body? Which is more real?” To me, this raises more questions than it answers. Beyond thinking about this work as a metaphor used to convey a sense of continuity and discontinuity, I found it difficult to make sense of it in relation to the constellation of works in the exhibition.
The Future is Behind Us succeeds in teasing out the implications of organising life through time while also offering divergent models of how to conceptualise it. Time becomes the environment itself, the domain and condition within which different artworks operate. But, of course, it is impossible to contain time, to codify it completely, and so parts of the exhibition remain unresolved, while others, to echo Ortega y Gasset, are distorted and disfigured through an attempt to clarify them. The exhibition is non-linear but not chaotic, unresolved and yet rigorous and, to use the words of Rosi Braidotti, it is “coherent without falling into instrumental rationality.”
Installation view: The Future Is Behind Us, 2022-2023. (Left) Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Orpheus Twice), 1991 and (right) Gian Maria Tosatti, I fondamenti della luce – archeologia (intonaco 7), 2015-2017. Courtesy of A4.
