A DISTRESSING IMAGE AFTER A SUDDEN INTERRUPTION OF MOVEMENT: AN IMAGE OF TIME
Mixed media installation, dimensions variable, 2021
Installation setup: Tereza Yakovyna
Documentation: Oksana Meister and Dariia Kuzmych
Distortions and disruptions of time perception may occur after sudden changes in the familiar continuity of everyday events. Personal, social or environmental crises disrupt and restructure previous orders. Time’s linearity, so useful for orientation, is shaken, torn, or melted, so that individuals may feel crushed or dissolved to the point of non-existence in the midst of shifting social and economic structures.
Lightning hits a tree, the tree falls across the road, a car races into the tree. When inertia is forced to change direction, energy is rearranged, and the linearity of time itself seems to splinter and deform. Traces of one movement, interrupted, contract into a collage of discordant sequences. You may find yourself, as it were, in a cove, watching the flow from outside. You may feel as if you had caught a glimpse of time as a whole, and an idea of what Nietzsche could have meant by the “monumentality” of time.
The installation consists of large-scale ink drawings, interweaved into an ephemeral construction. Lines interfere with shapeless forms, from time to time changing their accuracy, or just following the chaos of water and ink pigments. These diagrammatic drawings follow and combine some qualities of time in the way people experience it and the way they are expressed in languages: time flies, flows, stays still, it melts away, it fades out, it can be long, it expands and contracts, it jumps forwards and backwards, it can be overwhelming, it can be distressing – in some moments or longer periods you are confronted with it through your body. Sometimes, the body becomes the only time which exists.
Dariia Kuzmych