a moment in time
Christina Forrer, David Horvitz, Talisa Lallai, and Alexandra Navratil
4th November – 17th December 2016
Opening 3rd November, 6 – 8 pm
Preview 8th April, 6 – 8 pm
A moment is an undefined unit of time that can feel both very brief or extremely long. Used as in ‘a moment later’ it implies a very short, futile time span, whereas ‘the moment you do something’ is very distinct and permanent.
Our time is obsessed with freezing moments, be it on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat. All are tools that allow the recording and broadcasting of momentary occurrences or thoughts. With the total overflow that these recordings create, the individual moments often become meaningless and one in many and as such fade the moment they are created. The end result is the opposite of the original intention – an ever-recurring paradox.
This exhibition looks at artists and works that go against this trend. Out of love for the overlooked and ephemeral or to counter the Zeitgeist tendencies, the works in a moment in time, take a forgotten incident, a fading object, a quick snapshot and bring back the importance felt when they originally came about and by doing so extend its meaning and make it last forever.
Young Romans, Talisa Lallai’s 2015 series, make use of touristic photographs of antique statues. While the original prints were typical travel ephemera, recordings of a brisk visual encounter and later discarded to be picked up by the artist, the works in the show make this moment timeless and universal as it starts being symbolic for the nostalgia that we project in everything that predates us. These statues become stand-ins for the lives and identities of our predecessors and essentially for our own dreams and illusions.
Christina Forrer’s tapestries are like snapshots of scenes of domestic interaction or details taken of everyday environments. The depicted is often a little disconcerting but were it a photograph it would just disappear into our image filled unconsciousness where it might very well rest forever.
However, Forrer creates elaborate and time consuming weavings and by doing so freezes this snapshots into haunting pictures. The time it takes to create these wall hangings is an accumulation of moments spent with this one image and therefore embeds it with a much fiercer and denser presence.
Alexandra Navratil’s work All that Slides, Strikes, Rises and Falls, 2015 consists of black and white and colored woven cotton textiles, which reproduce nitrate celluloid filmstrips from early non-fiction films. The image sequences represent different cloud formations: promising steam clouds of industrial production and progress, raging and destructive carbon-black clouds from conflagrations and burning oil pits and mythical clouds disclosing subterranean volcanic and hydro-volcanic activity in colonial land. These ephemeral phenomena have been frozen in time and preserved, once by the fast paced medium of film and the archive where the film strips were kept the past decades, and then again by the artist choosing them and converting them into art works using a laborious, slow paced material.
Three standard breaths, or the shapes of hours, 2014, by David Horvitz is about time running out and what that does to the remaining, but counted moments. The three glass vases are made from the sand of three hour glasses. Time that is counted immediately becomes more meaningful and precious. By turning the sand into vases it is stopped from running out. This is then contradicted again by the cut roses whose time has been radically limited when they were plucked.
The Distance of a Day shows a concurrent sunset and sunrise filmed simultaneously by the artist and his mother in the Maledives and LA, looking at the same sun but at completely different moments in their day and lives.
Christina Forrer, born 1978 in Zurich, lives in Los Angeles, and holds a BA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo, Grice Bench, Los Angeles, 2016; Cat Women, solo, The Finley, Los Angeles, 2016; Unorthodox, curated by Jens Hoffman, Jewish Museum, New York, 2015; Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, 2015
David Horvitz, born 1982 in Los Angeles where he currently lives and works. He holds BAs from Waseda University in Tokyo and the University of California. He did his MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College in New York. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo, Galerie Allen, Paris, 2016; ja, solo, Chert, Berlin, oui, solo, Yvon Lambert Bookshop, Paris, 2016; Situation #20, solo, Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2015; David Horvitz: Gnomons, solo, curated by Helga Christoffersen, New Museum, New York, 2014; David Horvitz, solo, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, 2014; solo, Jan Mot, Brussels, 2014
Talisa Lallai, born 1989 in Frankfurt, lives in Dusseldorf and holds a BA from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Cuprum, curated by Clarisa Temestini, Cultural Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2016; This Is Your Replacement, curated by Adam Carr, Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf, 2016; Junge Römer, solo, Tom Dick or Harry, Dusseldorf, 2015; The Pleasant Shore, solo, BolteLang, Zurich, 2015; Terra Incognita, KIT, Dusseldorf, 2015; Disappear here, solo, curated by Alexandra Blättler, Coalmine, Winterthur, 2014
Alexandra Navratil, born 1978 in Zurich, lives in Amsterdam and holds a BA from Central St. Martins College and an MFA from Goldsmiths College, both in London. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include The Night Side, solo, Dan Gunn, Berlin, 2016; Silbersee, solo, Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art, Riga, 2016; In Search For Radical Incomplete #3 – Black Hole Hunters (duo with Susanne Winterling), curated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2016; Your Time Is Not My Time, de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, 2015; Form Regained, i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2015; Plunge/Soar, solo, CCS Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, 2014; Plunge/Soar, solo, BolteLang, Zurich, 2014