INDOC. Documentation Centre about Art and Nature

CDAN to open The Times of a Place exhibition in January

The project The Times of a Place brings together work by a number of artists exploring questions of time, various temporalities that share the common denominator of being developed in the natural environment.

The Times of a Place can be understood as the conjugation of a landscape. It enables the transition of the term “landscape” from its nominal condition to a verbal condition; it allows it to shift from a noun to a verb, as W.J.T. Mitchell advocated.

The pieces comprising this exhibition take their references from “landscapes” which are ultimately developed and shown as “places”, with “place” understood as a much broader and more ambivalent concept. In turn, place becomes a much more dense, rounded and complex term given that it incorporates the factor of time. Places become time capsules where events accumulate, layered like strata, and where the gaze activates the possible pasts of these places. The place dynamises the possible political meanings of a specific landscape, through the time its condenses.

At the same time, another of the elements shared by the works in this project is the fact that they are all based on temporal media, made on video or film. In the 1960s and 70s, the natural environment was recovered as a cinematographic motif by artists who were exploring new syntaxes and possibilities for the medium, and indeed it is again being recovered by contemporary artists. For all of them, the natural surroundings and the exploration of places enable an investigation into the non-narrative potential of the moving image and in turn to further explore and underscore the temporal parameter of this image. Film is capable of dynamising the landscape: it goes from being a static representation, as painting and photography had historically conceived it, to showing the natural environment in motion, thus achieving a closer approximation to the subjective and individual perception of the landscape.

Participating artists: Robert Smithson, Stan Brakhage, Chris Welsby, James Benning, Tacita Dean, Patricia Dauder, Darren Almond, Beryl Korot and Melik Ohanian.

Neus Miró. Exhibition curator.

More information

• Webpage for the exhibition (CDAN website)

Source: texts, CDAN ; on the right, stills from the work Creation (1979), by Stan Brakhage.

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