Julieta Aranda
You Had No 9th of May!
March 28 – April 27, 2008
Opening: Friday, March 28, 7 – 11 PM
517 Stieren
San Antonio, TX 78210
210 852 4492
salad [at] satx.rr.com
To break with the powerful linear conception of time as a line as a line consisting of Now-points seems to require a spatialization of a new kind. We need richer and more intricate architectural models that allow for temporal heterogeneity and multiplicity: not one line but always many.
Daniel Birnbaum, Temporal Spasms
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Sala Diaz is pleased to present a new work by Julieta Aranda, organized in conjunction with guest-curator Regine Basha.
Though we are conditioned to experience ‘time’ or the immaterial concept of time, as a linear passage –measured conveniently by clocks, calendars, and other devices, isn’t it possible that the markers that we use to signal it: ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ are an imposition ? Can’t we instead be the arbiters of our own experience of time? Can time be bent, sliced, poked through, stretched, flashed, collapsed?
Julieta Aranda’s new work, You Had No 9th of May! underlines the rigidity of our construction of time, and proposes as an alternative several material representations for it. What does the shape of time actually
look like?
Aranda’s primary source is the elusive International Date Line (IDL). Zigzagging across the earth, the IDL is an imaginary line on the globe that separates two consecutive calendar days and indicates the boundary between today and tomorrow. Despite its name however, the precise location of the IDL is not fixed by any international law, treaty or agreement (though it is commonly identified on maps as being 180 degrees longitude from the 0 meridian located in Greenwich, England). The peculiar course of the International Date Line in fact bends forward a day and back across the South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati, causing an aberration in our assumed time-space continuum (in 1995, the archipelago decided to move the dateline so that its territory would no longer be split between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’).
This temporal spasm in the IDL, and Kiribati’s power to literally ‘move time’ becomes the blueprint for Aranda’s installation and the basis for a configuration of both narrative and abstracted elements including wall drawings, diagrams, models and props, and a newspaper designed after Kiribati’s own (NEWSTAR) which brings together a collection of articles that cover the subject from several perspectives from the 1920s until today. There is also a resource library with a small selection of books dealing with alternative constructions of time including the Chronicles of Magallanes’ Circumnavigation, Borges’ “New Refutation of Time”, Liam Gillick’s “Erasmus is Late” and several essays on Zeno’s Paradox amongst other titles.
Central to Aranda’s inquiry is the idea of a politicized subjectivity and the power over the imaginary: how a little-known impoverished country like Kiribati, (save for when used for nuclear test-bombing by global powers, or when pilfered for phosphate) has the power to choose its own substantive experience of time and cause global temporal disturbances and inaccuracies. There are actions that take place in the political arena, but their poetic reverberations carry them much further than that. Did one of the most significant political and poetic acts of the last century go completely unnoticed?
Julieta Aranda is an artist from Mexico City currently living between Berlin and New York. Her work recently appeared in Transmediale 2008, Berlin, the 9th Lyon Biennial, Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, as well as at Portikus, Kunstwerke Berlin, and the 7th Havana Biennial. With Anton Vidokle, she has conceived the projects, PAWNSHOP and E-Flux Video
Rental (EVR).
Regine Basha is an independent curator currently moving from Central to Eastern time.
Sala Diaz is a 501 (C)(3) non-profit space supporting the San Antonio community with exhibitions of local, national and international artists and is located at 517 Stieren, near the intersection of South Alamo and South Saint Marys street in the heart of the Restaurant Supply District. Open weekly, Thursday – Saturday from 2 – 6 PM and every First Friday at 9 PM. Sala Diaz is sponsored by Fluent Collaborative, Liberty Bar, The National Endowment For The Arts and numerous private individuals.
