Time and discomfort gives insight into the overlapping of work and social time. Critical and playful narratives around a current oppression in relation to the standardization of life, work and leisure we discover in the works of this section. One Year Performance(1980-81) by Tehching Hsieh is an early example of the development of long-term performance art. His job was to serve a time clock every hour for twelve months. The individual pictures, which recorded a year of his life, are presented as a six-minute film along with other documentaries. The monotony of industrial work highlighted in Hsieh's performance underscores the dominance of Western time management, which Ragnar Kjartansson explores in Scenes from Western Culture (2015). Six video loops show scenes from everyday life and point to his fascination for the superficiality of social norms. Meanwhile, David Horvitz escapes with The Distance of a Day (2013) the usual time course, by contrasting videos of different locations and time zones of a single day.
Formable time explores material processes of historiography with a focus on the role of exploring artistic ways of working. In order to achieve new meanings and associations, artists are revisiting historical artifacts. Flowers for Africa(2014, 2017) by Kapwani Kiwanga stems from the artist's interest in archival images of postcolonial independence celebrations. Recognizing that floral arrangements are a common motif in many of these photographs, they have them reproduced by local florists for each exhibition in which the work is shown. The individual interpretation of the floral arrangements is combined with the seemingly codified collective meaning of history. Comparable relationships can be found in other works in this area. In Accelerated Time (2014), Stéphanie Saadé deals with time as a physical entity. The vase, broken into many fragments, suggests the influence of mysterious forces.
The area Time Recording: Staging the Living places the body in the foreground as a place that allows us to expand our perception of time, focusing on concepts of performance-based work. The actions of Pope.L rely on time duration and physical perseverance. The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001-2009) is one of his best known "crawls". He crawled the length of Broadway, Manhattan's longest street, wearing a Superman outfit and a skateboard strapped to his back. Often based on sources from pop culture or philosophy, Sophie Jung produces sprawling performances. The artist reactivates different parts of her installationCome Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water (2017-18) through recitations of words from memory and free intellectual improvisations. Jung's performance is about the ambivalence between language and objects and their transformation. A distorted interpretation of the teaching method "show and tell".
Finally, speculative and planetary time explores how digital connectivity and information technologies radically change our perception of time. The works of this section reflect the depth of time - the time beyond the human - and thus open up to us ideas about new worlds. In the video My Little Planet (2016), Agniezska Polska levitates animated objects of everyday use in the cosmos, combined with a humorous off-voice as a commentary on the consumer culture that dominates our world. Julian Charrière's large format photographs of the series First Light(2016-17) look at nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll, revealing an atomic landscape within an idyllic tropical island scenery. While Charrière's work focuses our attention on the existence of radioactivity, Daniel Gustav Cramer in Old Tjikko (2017) explores the world's oldest clonal tree. Standing in Sweden's Fulufjället National Park, its roots are estimated to be nearly 10'000 years old. Cramer explores the myth of spruce Old Tjikko, which is inextricably linked to the landscape and symbolizes the lifespan of our endangered planet.
Curated by SAMUEL LEUENBERGER and FELICITY LUNN