"If Space and Time are the coordinates from which we organize our state of being in the world, the truth is that during the period of conception and organization of this exhibition, various samples of contemporary art related to the idea of Time arose. Regarding this fact, a certain sort of generalized obsession with time and history should not be surprising.
From vintage fashion to monothematic television channels dedicated to the memory of the past, to the urgency to ‘make history' with what happened yesterday, focusing on a type of eternal permanent back-glance associated to a true cult of youth. The future of post-september 11th stopped being something of a promissor, demonstrated by the drastic drop in science fiction book sales while historic romance sales sky-rocketed like never before: the past seems to be the only safe and comfortable place for humanity in the beginning of the 21st century. It seems that nobody really wants to ‘give time to time', but the Greeks already spoke of the god Chronos -the god of time- as the god that ate his own children.
Keeping mythology aside, the announcement of Fukyama, two decades ago, about the end of the world, seems equally fantastic and mythical, history -a human organization of time from facts and events that have occurred- is everywhere, in the same proportion that it seems that as more time passes there is less and less time.
This exhibition sprouts from these affirmations, and also from the fact that MARCO has celebrated its fifth year of existence. On top of that, the museum is installed in a building that was a prison for many decades. Euan Macdonald, in correspondence exchanged during the process of organizing the exhibition, remembered that in English the expression ‘doing time' means to be imprisoned; So, precisely, now that we are in a museum, what we want is that inside of it time is spent and enjoyed: ‘taking time'.
‘Nada de nosso temos senão o tempo, de que gozam justamente aqueles que não têm paradeiro' [Nothing is ours but time, and only those who have no home truly enjoy it].
This phrase is found in a graffiti on a wall in the center of Lisbon -in the lower zone, in a corner between the Rua dos Sapateiros and the Rua de S. Nicolau- and it is accompanied by the figure of a man wearing an executive suit with a clock instead of a head. Graphically effective, the graffiti could allude to the fact that we are in one of the hearts of the Portuguese financial capital, where various banks scatter the streets, and simultaneously it is one of the areas with the highest percentage of beggars and homeless people. The phrase would be a sort of counterpoint and even the very inversion of the celebrated phrase ‘time is money' [...]
The phrase could also refer to a certain nomadism -‘that does not have shelter'- something that many contemporary artists experience, not only traveling constantly, but living in different countries than where they were born -see the biographical notes on the artists included in this exhibition- or even in the ever more common phenomena of artistic residences.
However, this was not exactly a criteria of selection for the works included in this exhibition, but rather by the following factors: works that come from instruments and devices that measure and organize time, that which we could designate as a physical dimension of time [...]; works that reflect on the passage of time, memory or oblivion, history -namely art history- and accumulation-sedimentation; and finally, works that touch on the political dimension of time, regarding the way in which the actual society relates with time living in a sort of urgency without an end or a defined objective.
The diversity of expressions, registers, languages and origins, demonstrates how the reflection on time brings a multiplicity of feelings and it will always be universal and founding of the human condition and the artistic practice. In this sense, an exhibition on time is always in some way a portrait, but also a landscape, of ourselves."
Isabel Carlos
Curator of the exhibition
