Time Trickles Here

Installation at Central House of Artists, Moscow 2011 A bucket of water ‘reflecting’ the sky. A sign stating ‘Time trickles here’. An out of bounds area protecting nothing but the memory of shadow and light. On their way to the exhibition venue in central Moscow visitors will have passed countless reminiscent ‘installations’ of barriers, danger tape and haphazard structures. Rarely do these protective measures seem fit for the purpose of protecting the man or woman on the street from falling down a hole or tripping on a wire, rather they appear to be ‘protecting’ the abandoned work of labourers across the city from potential threat. The streets of Moscow are in upheaval and these temporary, makeshift, architectural interventions seek to assert themselves with the visual signifiers of authority. Brought into the gallery, (through a combination of the readymade and constructed replica) with warning texts replaced by ambiguous statements like ‘time trickles here’ the objects or props take on a very different kind of protective urgency, one much more absurd than ‘beware, hole’. Time is considered to be precious. We feel the passage of time is capable of acceleration or deceleration during moments of excitement or banality. Therefore does the installation suggest as we view it and the other works in the group show, that the flow of time and space around us slows down encouraging us to linger? Or as the statement is dressed in the aesthetics of danger – Is time escaping through some invisible black hole or trying to force it’s way onwards and in? The photographic plays a slippery role in the construction of this tableaux. Certain surfaces within the installation contain images of themselves from another time, another place. In a corruption of the actual relationship between shifting light and a surface, shadows that do not travel or fade are fixed in a juxtaposition that suggest all slows to a stop – perhaps as a chance for the individual to examine what occurs to the fabric of a city in perpetual flux.