Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives

Accelerator presents the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia of London-based artist Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA). The exhibition features several of Sin’s recent video works. The centrepiece is the premiering The Time of Our Lives, from which the exhibition takes its name.

In the new two-channel video installation The Time of Our Lives, a science fiction sitcom plays out in front of a ‘live’ studio audience. In a domestic setting, moments from the lives of the couple V Sin and Wai King unfold through sequences beyond standardised clock time and linear chronologies. Drawing from theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the work uproots the concept of absolute time as a means to challenge assumptions about objective truth and consensus reality.

The exhibition also includes Dreaming the End (2023)—an evocative film that blends cinematic genres and presents a circular narrative in which the characters change bodies and spaces in a continuous flux—and several works from the series Portraits (2023–ongoing). Eclectic and complex characters inhabit Sin’s cosmos, some regularly appearing in different guises across the artist’s oeuvre. The main constant in the exhibition is change; Sin’s narratives are imbued with the possibility of changing reality through the performative power of storytelling.

Sin works with performance, moving image, installation, writing and print. In their work, there is an inherent concentration on the power of language over the personal and social body, and a belief that the stories told about our realities also create them. They use speculative fiction to challenge categorical knowledge production and cultural narratives. The binary categories that characterise our consciousness of ourselves and the world around us are disrupted through references and methods from science fiction, drag, Cantonese opera, art history and popular culture. The audience is invited to testimonies from spaces of liminality that go beyond gender and cultural dichotomies, between life and death, self and other, dream and awakening, fantasy and reality.

After The Time of Our Lives (2024) premieres in Stockholm, the work will tour to Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects in New York and Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong in 2025.