Days of Endless Time at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

Milan Kundera, Slowness

Until April 6, the Hirshhorn Museum is hosting – at the second level of the building – Days of Endless Time, a group exhibition of video art pieces.

Quoting Kundera introduces us to the atmosphere the exhibition creates while the visitor walks through it. The architectonical structure twists and turns throughout dark corridors, while spaces of intimate coves allow visitors to stop and stare at the fourteen video installations.

The Hirshhorn Museum’s description for the show is very punctual and poetic at the same time:
“In a world conditioned by the frantic, 24/7 flow of information and the ephemerality of digital media, many moving-image artists are countering these tendencies with works that emphasize slower, more meditative forms of perception. Days of Endless Time presents fourteen installations that offer prismatic vantage points into the suspension and attenuation of time or that create a sense of timelessness. Themes include escape, solitude, enchantment, and the thrall of nature.”

This state of meditation forces the spectator to pause the “flow” of his/her visit: the aesthetic beauty created above all through the use of the slowness itself turns out to be hypnotic.
The first work presents a delicate conversation between man and nature through the production and reproduction of sound (“L’Echo” by Su-Mei Tse) and the last work is one of the famous portraits by Bob Wilson representing a famous pop star (Lady Gaga) as Mademoiselle Caroline-Rivière by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. But one of the most representative sparkle of the concept that is the exhibition’s file rouge is Sigalit Landau’s video “Deadsee”: the artist created a wonderful equilibrium between time, space and color spectrum.

VVAA, Days of Endless Time is at Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC through April 6, 2015.