A Time in Pieces

When a historical moment falls apart – into something unforeseen, something disparate, something intricate – we witness a divergence in the flow of time. The present starts to flicker, exposing and bursting the seams of reality. The gravity of the moment takes over entirely. Time becomes a fossil, an enduring and persistent ‘now’. With time at stake, using the projections rooted in the pulsating ‘now’, A Time in Pieces seeked to materialise the sutures, stitching together the shredded fabric of the present. It’s a pledge, a testimony, an attempt – to speak out of time. An attempt to speak too early. With an emphasis on contemporary chronopolitics – the unstable relationship between regimes of power, concepts of time, and social and political imagination – the exhibition centered around a temporal ecosystem that is shaped by the lived experience of military occupation, displacement and the trauma of war. Within this framework, A Time in Pieces probed the field of regulated perceptions of temporality as both a tool and target of political action. The extremity of the present has become quotidian, and it is experienced as a trap, a quagmire, a dead-end. In seeking to shape the future in the present – or to prevent it taking shape – the politics of time is intimately linked to how transformation is perceived and managed, and, at its core, to whether transformation can be achieved at all. This deprivation of a future-oriented imagination thus links chronopolitics to necropolitics, similarly determining the lives that are deemed worthy or unworthy of imagining what lies ahead.