Flowers fade at different rates. In the November chill of a Glasgow art gallery, cut flowers—carefully arranged in a vase on the floor, their silhouette cast against the wall by the light from a projector—are taking their time to die, or to appear dead. (When exactly do cut flowers die?) At a certain moment of decay, a new vase will be selected from a nearby glass shelf, and a florist will arrange another bouquet, precisely styled to match the historical period of the vase that will contain it. This process has been set in motion by artist Corin Sworn and forms a work called Temporal Arrangements (2010). The vases come from Sworn’s own collection. The projector, I’m told, came from Yugoslavia—a country that no longer exists. The multiple temporalities that Sworn’s work draws attention to form the irregular heartbeats of “A Synchronology,” a group show at Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery. The exhibition, curated by art historian Dominic Paterson, is itself a temporal marker: it has been conceived to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Common Guild, a Glasgow-based arts organization which runs a gallery in the city and commissions off-site projects including, in 2013, “Scotland + Venice” at the 55th Venice …