Time After Time

Caroline Bergvall, Victor Burgin, Hamad Butt, John Latham, Charlotte Posenenske, Walter van Rijn

John Hansard Gallery, part of the University of Southampton, is pleased to present Time After Time, curated by Stephen Foster (Director 1987–2017), that reflects on the Gallery‘s history and programme.

Since being founded in 1980, John Hansard Gallery has been located on the University’s Highfield campus in a building that was originally designed to house a tidal model of the Solent basin. During this time, the Gallery was marked by a consistent and focused programme, an element of which explored the legacy of the early conceptual art movement and its influence on succeeding generations of artists.

In 2018, John Hansard Gallery relocated to a new purpose-built city centre space in Southampton’s Guildhall Square. Bridging both its previous and new city centre homes, Time After Time re-examines some key site-specific installations that were shown at the Gallery between 1992 and 2016 by artists Caroline Bergvall, Victor Burgin, Hamad Butt, John Latham, Charlotte Posenenske, alongside a new work by Walter van Rijn.

In 2010, Caroline Bergvall created Middling English for John Hansard Gallery. Evolving from her AHRC Research Fellowship in the University of Southampton’s English Department, Middling English combined poetry, sound and a highly counterbalanced sculptural installation that spanned the Gallery. For Time After Time, Bergvall has returned to and reworked this project, developing it further in relation to the Gallery’s new home.

Victor Burgin’s Belledonne (2016) was the final artist’s commission at John Hansard Gallery’s previous home on Highfield campus, commissioned for the exhibition Barthes/Burgin in 2016 that paired Burgin’s works with a selection of rarely seen drawings by Roland Barthes. Represented for Time After Time, Belledonne explores ideas around memory and absence, reflecting on Barthes’ stay as a young man in a Tuberculosis sanatorium in the South of France.

In 1992, Hamad Butt was commissioned by the Gallery to make Familiars, an installation containing the chemical halogens chlorine, iodine and bromine. These halogens are presented in highly precarious situations within glass containers, creating a giant version of a Newton’s Cradle, a Venus flytrap and a Jacob’s Ladder. 

John Latham’s installation N-U Niddrie was shown at John Hansard Gallery in 2006 as part of a retrospective of his work that was conceived with Latham prior to his death in January 2006. For Time After Time, these elements will be brought back together to remake the 2006 version, that is part of the wider “N-U Niddrie” series that also includes Latham’s iconic book and glass sculptures.

In 1967–68, Charlotte Posenenske created a series of “prototypes,” after which she ceased making work and announced her resignation from the art world with a manifesto published in Art International. A solo exhibition of Posenenske’s works was held at John Hansard Gallery in 2011, and Time After Time features one of her recreated one of her recreated Vierkantrohre Serie DW (Square Tube Series DW) (1967–2018).

For Time After Time, Walter van Rijn has created a new series of works that use the Gallery’s exhibitions history as their starting point. van Rijn has worked closely with the Gallery’s exhibitions team and archives to create Unconsumable Global Luxury Dispersion (2013–17) from the exhibition titles, artists’ names and artwork titles from 1980 to 2016. This data is dispersed around the installation via a searchable database, books, wallpaper, text-based prints, and large digital screens.

The exhibition Time After Time examines the long-term value of what are often initially conceived as temporary or transient works, helping bridge the original John Hansard Gallery location with its new city centre home. This exhibition explores the nature of site-specificity in various ways, some of the works represented for Time After Time were made to be preserved, some have been adapted from earlier presentations, and some have been reimagined from their original showings.

A new publication has been produced on the occasion of Time After Time, featuring full-colour illustrations of works in the exhibition, alongside a curatorial essay written by Stephen Foster.

Time After Time has been made possible through support from The Henry Moore Foundation.

Press Contact:
Jack Lewis, Communications Co-ordinator
J.W.Lewis [​at​] soton.ac.uk
T +44 (0)23 8059 2477