I saw two really interesting shows this week both of which left me reflecting on the passing of time and how it is recorded. Firstly I saw the Hanne Darboven show at Camden Arts Centre. Her work I find interesting but also intense. Carefully ordered and displayed are numerous manuscripts, doodles marks and calculations that mark the structure and repetitive nature of time. Complex number systems and patterns are laid out in a methodical way and the last room of the exhibition links these patterns to a musical score.
It was the work second room of the exhibition that I really engaged with. This is a series of prints from a film calendar on which Darboven has for each date made a repetitive scribble that closely resembles a written form. The contrast of the Hollywood image and these repetitive scrawls is quite marked and it feels as if Darboven is highlighting the banality of this constant film making and that a drawn mark is as valid as marking time as a hollywood blockbuster. It is as if each day becomes another scribble as the uniformity and repetitive nature of time is marked out.
The second show I saw this week which also engaged with the use of drawing to mark the passage of time was work presented by IC-98 at Beaconsfield, a great space near Vauxhall. I had the privilege to watch three fantastic animations by Markus Lepisto, ‘A View from the Other Side’ can also be seen here. Lepisto’s work engages with the passing of time through detailed and absorbing animation. ‘A View From the Other Side’ engages the viewer with observing the passing of time for one neo-classical building in Turku, Finland. The animation takes us through the buildings change of use over time and meditatively reflects on how time and politics can influence public and private spaces. There is a melancholy to the work and a overwhelming sense of loss with the passing of time. This is heightened buy the organ music and certainly watching the animation projected onto the big screen in the dark desolate arch space of Beaconsfield with the trains rumbling overhead added to the sense that I was witnessing the documentation of a lament to a building that had perhaps lost is soul. A very moving afternoons viewing.
Selected Interruptions 