In Their Time. Traces With Weight

The present is not only the here and now, but also includes the past through memory and the future through expectation. The present is therefore a space in which we understand where we have come from and project where we want to go. Present, past and future are thus intertwined. Just as the past can only be regarded from a present and the view into the future is merely a current perspective unfolding before the experiential horizon of the past, everything that occurs in the present is related to a before and after.

This is also true of art. For the fact that something is recognized and acknowledged as art, and thus the way it is interpreted and appraised, always owes to a cultural and societal context. It is therefore rooted in its time and for this reason subject to constant change. As a consequence, what we understand as art and what emerges as art, is not firmly established, but must be repeatedly fathomed anew by artists and perceived anew by viewers.

Such a concept of art as deeply historically conditioned, which is accompanied by an awareness of the historicity of one’s own approach, one’s own interpretation and one’s own experience, casts a long shadow on the structure of collections. For not only does collecting  take place in a specific present, our view of collections is also one that is situated in time and therefore subject to change. Collections always reflect their time, with all its blind spots. They tell stories and so do we, while other stories remained untold.

Against this background, time is the “theme” and the starting point of the collection presentation. It is thus a profoundly self-reflexive endeavor based on considering what collections—and ultimately art—actually are, how we read them and how we deal with them. Time is not understood as the happening of time, however, but as happening in time. Even if the former can be considered and made productive for processes of art production, interpretation and collection, they are all based on a temporal process that begins in the past, continues into future, and whose shaping is only a frozen snapshot of that very process. Starting from these deliberations, the collection presentation In ihrer Zeit. Spuren von Gewicht (In Their Time. Traces With Weight) explores art’s being-and-becoming-in-time, or rather, being-and-becoming-in-its-time, and raises questions of temporality: as process, duration, change, and transience, as setting oneself in relation to the present and as imagining what is to come.

Curated by Stefanie Kleefeld.