On a street in London, a woman walks draped in an impossibly long, radiantly blue textile. The fabric gives her the air of a queen, but a queen out of place and out of time. She seems to move at a completely different pace from her bustling urban surroundings. Nobody notices her, as if she’s a ghost. It’s a visitation of the colonized to the colonizer. She has an almost untouchable strength, but seems also powerless; she can protect herself, but not anyone around her.
The video installation from Tsedaye Makonnen is part of a series of works that’s part of “Dyschronics,” running now at Artspace through April 16. As the accompanying description of the show reads, “ ‘Dyschronics’ is an exhibition that does not recognize clocks, linear progression, or chrono-logies. It is an antagonism to the ‘Western Hour’ via interruptions, waiting, transitions, intervals, and in-between moments.… Acknowledging that the modern construction of time, composed of chronos and kairos, or quantitative and qualitative time, is an imposition, ‘Dyschronics’ revels in temporalities that resist a linear, monolithic tempo.”
This all may sound esoteric, but it speaks to something quite real about the way we live and perceive our lives. The strict ticking of a clock is tied, inextricably, to shift work, the kind of job where you punch in and punch out. When we’re relaxing, nobody pays that much attention to how fast time passes. Some afternoons can feel like days; an evening can pass in what feels like a minute. Meanwhile, few things teach us about time’s apparent flexibility like raising children: sometimes a minute takes an eternity, and sometimes the hours just melt away in a flurry of activity. Many artists describe themselves as working at their best when they lose the sense of time passing altogether. Writ large, an examination of how the lived experience of time as a relatively flexible thing has gotten chopped up into regimented measured minutes and seconds is an examination of colonialism, of capitalism, and of the discounting of work done in the home versus in the office. One can understanding measured time as another way that the lives of women, and the lives of people getting the short ends of the sticks of colonialism and capitalism, have been demeaned.
The conceptual context for the show overall is literally laid out in Baseera Khan’s pieces, which occupy the first two galleries on the left as one enters Artspace. On tables surrounded by comfy bean bag chairs, inviting a long read, are books like Frantz Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth, about the dehumanizing effects of colonialism, and Vijay Prasad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. On the walls are banners that have the same spirit as the best public library art, encouraging exploration of the self as much as acquisition of knowledge. The pieces in Khan’s Reading room, on purpose “imagine spiritual and queer domestic and public sites wherein time is reclaimed for rest and contemplation.” Khan’s work introduces the idea that this show isn’t one to be walked past or breezed through, but lived in for a bit. We’re supposed to slow down.
In the next gallery Carolina Caycedo’s Serpent River Book “depicts Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican communities as they encounter the displacing effects of industrialized and privatized river systems,” as the explanatory text details. It’s accompanied by the video To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise, “which illuminates the expansive and cyclical diverse hydrographies such as the Colorado, the Yaqui, the Xingu, the Spree, and the Magdalena rivers throughout time for local and Indigenous communities.” The combination of the two pieces is powerful. The sounds and images from the video — sometimes scenes of rivers and water sounds, sometimes scenes of people with the sounds of voices and music — draw the viewer in, while Serpent River Book is a piece to explore, though the way Caycedo has set it up, it must be done carefully. To read the text on offer, to really learn, requires a light step, a lesson the intrusive corporate forces on these landscapes have never learned.
In the next gallery, artist Emily Jacir’s documentary letter to a friend “investigates a crime before it occurs in her Palestinian neighborhood threatened by Israeli occupation through epistolary correspondence, archival research, and footage from the past decade. The documentary simultaneously anticipates and bears witness to displacement.” The experience of watching it is riveting in its apparent normalcy. We are used to seeing footage from Palestine from a very specific set of viewpoints, a point driven home by a snapshot of a cluster of TV news cameras that, we are told, all congregate on the same block, all the time, to get the footage they need for the day’s story. Meanwhile, our documentarian’s roving cameras — the piece is put together from multiple sources — show us a more finely grained view of a place where the reminders of oppression (specifically, the large concrete walls that chop up the neighborhood) are everywhere and the threat of violence seems like a constant irritant. When it happens, it happens with a weary inevitability that speaks volumes.
Which brings us back to Tsedaye Makonnen’s pieces flowing across Artspace’s largest gallery. “Astral Sea I, III, and IV (2019 – 2021) textiles and performances recall the transhistorical forced migrations of Black communities across the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea,” the accompanying text reads. “The mirrors adorning the textiles invoke a bearing of the past into the present within Makonnen’s ritualized performances.” A voice intones the names of women we have lost, one after the other, with a slow reverence that demands attention while the viewer is in the space. The cascading fabric is both regal and oceanic, a reminder of the Middle Passage and the kingdoms lost to colonialism and the slave trade. Makonnen’s pieces are yet another set of works In a gallery full of pieces that dilate time. They let us contemplate how very long the history of oppression is that they detail, and also let us understand how close to the present it all still is.
“Dyschronics” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through April 16. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
