Location: Meštrović Pavilion
Date: 25.4. - 16.6.2024
Opening: 25.4.2024, 19:00
Curator: Lovro Japundžić
The masters of time don't have a visible face, much like the emperor in the children's game "Emperor, Emperor, how many hours?" In this game, the emperor has his back turned while other players inquire about the time. The goal is to approach the emperor with animal-like jumps and eventually take over his role. If the emperor responds to the time question with "The clock fell into the well," players return to the beginning of the game. The legitimacy of the emperor is maintained by his just regulation of time shifts. Returning to the start is never fun, but perhaps it's a better option than desperate attempts to get closer to the emperor.
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Everything around us exists as an expression of time, a measure we learn and use to understand the world we encounter. The perception of time is fragmented and scattered, formed through various experiences in the body, receptors in the brain, and mental constructions — time is multisensory. American neuroscientist David Eagleman argues that sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste are senses with clear functions that rarely overlap. Time is also a sense, but it stretches through everything we perceive and seek to define. "It rides on all the other senses."[1] The experience of the passage of time is inseparable from thinking in temporal units, abstract spaces, hands of clocks, and numbers that determine the rhythms of the world. In our hands, we hold tools for measuring duration, steps, or distances daily, providing an illusion of security and control over our own time. These same tools transform personal routines into measurable data that gain market value and serve to create a fictive outline of a person, their emotional and physical state, social position, and aspirations.
The rhetoric of time management and living by the clock serve as rarely disputed measures of human worth, purpose, and meaning. The disciplining of time is the result of a social agreement, stemming from colonial and Enlightenment methods of measurement through the introduction of time zones, mechanical clocks, and the commodification of labour.[2] The abstraction of the concept of time accompanies the rise of extractive policies that place local specificities and natural processes outside the economic clock. Besides being measurable, time can be bought and sold. Inequality in the possession of time becomes a reflection of all other social inequalities. "Someone or something always gives time to someone else, which doesn't necessarily mean literally giving minutes or hours, but rather determining someone's experience of time."[3] We must distinguish between those for whom time is measured and those who voluntarily exploit themselves, elevating busyness and lack of time as signs of superiority.
The colonization of time, and consequently late capitalist technology with its "constant stream of low-level stimuli," gradually dulls and exhausts the ability to perceive not only the temporalities of others but also one's own.[4] We've adapted to normative time, the linear movement that ignores the "temporal cacophony" of the planet to which we belong. There are a multitude of clocks ticking simultaneously, intertwining and influencing the delicate relationships of the plant and animal world. The lack of their synchronization has permanently disrupted the relationships of migration, reproduction, and survival.[5] In society as well as in the natural world, there are various temporal curves that operate in different sequences and tempos. They are attempted to be tamed by adapting them to dominant groups that are set as metronomes, correcting the rhythm. Sometimes, institutions take on this role, with their regime of progress depending on the cycles of conventional time that we have internalized and naturalized — work, family, recreation, and leisure. From the dangers of hypothetical temporalities (what if?), we are protected by life and health insurance, wills, anti-ageing creams, and airbags in cars. For some subjects, these temporal frameworks do not apply as their temporalities are fractured, risky, or filled with voids. Among them are those whose otherness does not contribute to capital, and the rejection of longevity and stability usurps the script of normative time.[6]
The post-pandemic world, marked by political precarity and the climate crisis, has introduced apocalyptic rhetoric into public discourse, ranging from attempts at resistance and the construction of new worlds to the destruction and reconstruction of old ones. The truth is that there is actually no collective agreement on the future or the ability to bear the burden of time. Each of us has experienced several endings of the world, while on a daily basis, personal anxieties, fears, or traumas make the end elusive. The evasion of a clearly defined perspective, the abandonment of utopian futures, or the end that never arrives are opportunities for more creative possibilities of being with time. It constantly rediscovers its own porosity and propensity for excess through unpredictable, unproductive, slowed, or ruptured temporalities. These interruptions and silences show how the management of time is not compatible with the real, human, and non-human rhythms of the world.
In the focus of the 37th edition of the Youth Salon lies an exploration of new beginnings, unfinished endings, and imperfect futures. The presented works invite the discovery of neglected relationships with time by questioning the relationship between one's own and others' temporalities marked by distorted chronologies, anachronisms, and inconsistencies. Abandoning absolute temporal categories and causal relationships reveals how everything exists as a continuous materialization of time that intersected at some point. Unpredictable outcomes, devastated landscapes, and wounded textures reveal hidden power relations that threaten time by erasure. Traces of interactions are captured in media and algorithmic manipulations that distance information from its original context. Seeking original meanings may mean being willing to surrender to dissociative moments of everyday life, listening to biological impulses and chemical processes, allowing for dreamlike, magical, and euphoric moments. It can also involve transcending one's own physical and affective boundaries, reviving the inanimate, opening up to the non-human or the touch of synthetic textures of technology.
LITERATURA:
[1] Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain, The New Yorker, 2011.
[2] Kevin K. Birth, Time Blind: Problems in perceiving other temporalities, Palgrave Macmillan (2017.), str. 124.
[3] Jenny Odell, Saving time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Random House (2023.), str. 57
[4] Mark Fisher, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, Visual Artists Ireland (2014.)
[5] Astra Taylor, Out of Time: Listening to the climate’s clock, Laphams Quarterly (2019.)
[6] Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press (2005.)
Lovro Japundžić (born in 1990, Zagreb) completed his studies in Art History and Sociology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, as well as the CuratorLab program at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design Konstfack in Sweden. He is a curator and producer with extensive experience in curating and producing exhibitions, festivals, and other cultural programs. Since 2018, he has been a member of the curatorial collective running the International Festival Organ Vida, and since 2019, he has been working as a curator at the Močvara Gallery. Between 2021 and 2023, he worked as one of the directors of the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery (GMK). In 2023, he participated in a residency as part of the curatorial program of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Madrid. In 2018/2019, he participated as a curator in the Parallel project – a European platform for contemporary photography. From 2013 to 2019, he worked as a program selector and promoter for the Association for the Promotion of Independent Music Culture – Živa muzika. Alongside his curatorial work, he also worked as a producer for the collaborative performance group – BADco.
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