TIME SCAPES
A collaborative project assignment between Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and the University of Cologne, Laboratory for Art and Research is exhibited as public art-project on a poster wall in cooperation with Camera Austria, Labor für Fotografie und Theorie as part of The City and the Good Life in Graz, Austria.
Professor Sabine Bitter and Teaching Assistant Aakansha Ghosh from Vancouver worked with Professor Karina Nimmerfall and Research Associate Maximiliane Baumgartner to organize a discussion between students from Vancouver and Cologne as well as the exhibtion of the works in Graz.
The artistic research assignment Time Scapes focuses on the possibilities of critical alternatives to normative concepts of time – in particular on the understanding of time as social practice and utopia as temporal as well as spatial phenomenon. Artistic tools and methods of visual display are employed to investigate and research time as a new ‘pandemic landscape’.
How can time be explored, represented and negotiated within the field of art? Which new space-time relations will emerge from the impact of Covid-19? Will new forms of space-time-body experience arise from the new entanglements of private and public, physical and virtual spaces? How can these connections be experienced, analyzed and utilized through artistic practices?
Challenged by the new experience of teaching and studying practice-based courses via remote online tools, Time Scapes utilized this temporary figuration to investigate the current situation. The impossibility of being in a shared room, studio or on location (conducting artistic field work) is replaced by the space-time-situation spent together online, connecting our private spaces and further blurring the already dissolved boundaries of the private and public, the physical and virtual, as well as life and work.
Confronted by daily graphs and statistics during the pandemic and departing from Annette Krauss’ Unlearning Exercises, the project assignment critically investigates and utilizes the omnipresent visual display of quantitative information. Based on a time dairy and the collection of different sets of data on individual activities (productive, communicative, leisure, work, reproductive and immaterial labour, care etc.) students render either their week or one day into a diagram or diagrammatic setting as a form of an artistic research methodology, analyzing and reflecting different concepts of time from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Participating students from SFU: Noor Abouchehade, Yerin Choi, Natasha Dennison, Agnes Fan, Tye Gill, Henry Hart, Elizabeth Li, Daniel Molnar, Shana Qi, Quinton Qiu, Kinar Saragih, Carly Seemann, Hana Shinkai, Irene Weng, Minty Zhang.
Participating students from Univerity of Cologne: Evelina Chsherbakova, Björn Cullmann, Philine Elster, Jana Feldt, Marie Höltje, Anna Klee, Kristina Kränzler, Elias Müller, Mareen Müller, Tomke Niehaus, Jannik Schulz, Li Zi.
Part of the temporary staircase, this wall is used by Camera Austria as public-art billboard.
Time Scapes is exhibtited until November 22nd 2020.
Photo credit: Markus Krottendorf
More information here:
Camera Austria: Site-Specific (Public) Lessons | The City & The Good Life
Karina Nimmerfall
Laboratory for Art and Research
University of Cologne, Kunst- und Kunsttheorie