011 TIME

IN DEN FLÜSSEN nördlich der Zukunft
werf ich das Netz aus, das du
zögernd beschwerst
mit von Steinen geschriebenen Schatten
—PAUL CELAN

Time, that jarring question, is perhaps the most vital problem of metaphysics. One of the great uncertainties of humankind in the course of history has been to define its nature, whether that of mathematics or that of living beings. Determining its flow has been an obsession, and it is commonly held that it flows from past to future, but the opposite notion is no less logical.

The work of an artist is to vindicate the temporality and persistence of its media concerning the historical gaze of the spectator. In this way, contemporary art allows us to discover compositions that reconstruct possible pasts, while is trying to undo conflicts of the present, in processes governed by its end. This attitude evokes a fluid place beyond the inevitable flow of time that comes from the future and advances unstoppable to the past. Contemporary art practices unleash a harmonic process of perception and understanding that opens up new meanings and ways of comprehension of the aesthetic, and in turn, makes us aware of our time.

Resumed in slow and almost silent actions that coexist from the complex and the essential, the quest of an artist is to release dialectics between the practice and its time, in poetics that flow, just like Paul Celan’s rivers: from a time that is the north.

—ENTKUNSTUNG

Mama (series)
Anna Breit
2019
Alicja Kwade | Studio Visit
Louis De Belle
2019
Arctic Ocean (Northwest off the coast of Ellesmere Island, CAN) 83° 19’ 44.976"N, 79° 18’ 22.957"W, July 17th, 2017
Zaria Forman
2018
Saturnine
Martin Maeller
2019

Nicht nur kommt die Idealisierung des Prozesses der naiven Neugierde des Kunstliebhabers entgegen und ermutigt den Dilettanten in seinem selbstherrlichen Unvermögen.

Time also flows, as in the verse of the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno: from the eternal tomorrow.