Wednesday seminar: Thinking Time – Making Time

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this spring “Processes of Documentation”, where we explore a wide range of processes of documentation emerging within the field of artistic research. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

With: Petra Bauer, Ray Borg, Christina Koch, Chrysa Parkinson, Hendrik Quast, Gwennaelle Rakotovao and John-Paul Zaccarini

In this seminar we will turn our attention to the question of time: how we understand it, use it, and are shaped by it in our artistic practices. Time is never just a neutral line moving forward. It can be speculative and stretchable, as in many artistic experiments. It can follow the straight chronologies of modernity – or break against them through queer shifts and other ways of organising life and process. In Saidiya Hartman we find a temporal logic marked by the violence of the archive and the persistent presence of what has been lost; in Denise Ferreira da Silva we encounter a possibility to think time and space not as separate dimensions but as entangled relations that shape us. And we might also remember Walter Benjamin, who reminded us that every now carries traces of other times.

From these different points of departure, we invite you to a roundtable conversation where six practitioners share how they work with time in their projects. Each participant offers a short 5–10 minute glimpse into their relationship to time: how time is made, stretched, documented, lost, shared, or emerges within the practice itself.

The roundtable format matters here. If time is relational, and if time and space constantly create one another, then we also need to meet in a form that carries this: where different voices can be heard alongside each other, where thoughts can circulate and where we listen together. The hope is that the conversation will not only be about time, but also create a moment where we experience time in new ways – together.