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TIME AND FOAM

CRACOW
21.10.2020- 26.11.2020


In 1989, French spectralist Gérard Grisey completed his Le Temps et l'Écume, a piece for which he drew inspiration from the ideas of American physicist John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler argued that space-time fluctuates in the form of quantum foam - excitations and vortices discernible only on the Planck value scale (about 10^(-35)m). To this day, this hypothesis has not been experimentally proven - because there is no apparatus that could demonstrate its correspondence to the real structure of the world. Grisey chose to interpret it, treating it as a capacious metaphor for the temporal structure in which he played out his musical universe. In the piece for four percussions, two synthesizers and a chamber orchestra, the space-time foam helps convey the relativized course of time in the form of three modalities built on the same musical material: time as perceived by humans, birds and whales.

The Time and Foam exhibition has no ambition to approach the foundations governing space-time. It does not give us answers to the most basic questions about the flow of time, nor does it attempt to illustrate the state of research of physicists, philosophers, neuroscientists or historians. Like Grisey's gesture, however, it builds metaphors that, brought together in a single exposition, form constellations that momentarily illuminate certain problems, questions and confrontations in the face of the elusiveness, relativity and inconsistency of the time in which we are immersed. Thus, detached from its astro-physical context, the foam becomes for a moment just such a metaphor, giving birth, like successive bubbles, to further associations and metonymies.

The works in the exhibition will attempt to create a story about our late-capitalist reality, in which time is simultaneously jagged and globally homogeneous. Derivatives and transactions, the permanent flow of capital, the movement of people, cheap flights, atomic clocks, a unified eight-hour workday, working around the clock and lack of sleep seem to contradict nature's biological time in its cyclical variability. Today, it is perhaps even more difficult for us to understand what time is and how it is captured by humans.

Curator:
Michał Zawada

Artists:
Marta Antoniak, Tomek Baran, Andrzej Bednarczyk, Małgorzata Biłuńska, Pamela Bożek, Iwona Demko, Bartek Górny, Karolina Jabłońska, Karolina Jarzębak, Martyna Kielesińska, Emilia Kina, Piotr Korzeniowski, Marta Krześlak, Tomasz Kręcicki, Krzysztof Maniak, Michał Myszkowski, Monika Niwelińska, Kinga Nowak, Alicja Pakosz, Cyryl Polaczek, Filip Rybkowski, Zbigniew Sałaj, Michał Sroka. Dominik Stanisławski, Witold Stelmachniewicz, Łukasz Stokłosa, Radek Szlęzak, Michał Zawada, Konrad Żukowski