Published: 10:16, February 21, 2025
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The knotty issue of unraveling time
By Chitralekha Basu
Monica Narula of Raqs Media Collective performs We are Knotted, We Come Undone at M+.  (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

“Let’s wear time,” reads the writing on the expansive blackboard, which also displays images of knotted leather thongs worn by cavemen, a magnified teardrop and a nuclear radioactive danger sign among others. Filmmaker Tzuan Wu adds a chalk drawing of a scarf to an existing cluster and labels its loose ends with the words “past” and “future”.

Wu is at a participatory lecture-performance where Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective is urging spectators to consider the idea of time as a knotted form, as his colleague Monica Narula writes down the key words from his speech on the blackboard. The show ends with viewers contributing to the collective artwork.

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The performance complements Narula’s illustrated talk, titled Knots, in which she leads the audience through an entire gamut of loosely connected, or knotted, ideas — from how the jacquard looms anticipated computer coding, to Karl Marx’s theory of work, delineating how in the knotty capitalist system, workers are alienated from their own humanity and indeed their capacity for intelligence. There is a blink-and-you-miss-it nod to Groucho Marx as well, split seconds after Narula recites the 14th-century mystic poet and seer Kabir’s verses about a world that seems to have been turned on its head.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta of Raqs Media Collective invites viewers to visualize time in the form of knots at a lecture-performance at M+.(PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

“Everyone feels in their bones that we are entangled, knotted, and everyone also knows that moment when unraveling happens” is how Narula describes the core idea informing the two lecture-performances. “What we offer viewers is an exploration, with us, through ideas, concepts, images and suggestions that connect the bodily, visceral and deeply personal level of experience to the cosmic, the intravenous and the interstitial.”

Held at M+ museum last Saturday, the twin lecture-performances were part of a daylong showcase of how contemporary artists engage with the concept of time. Called Avant-Garde Now: Sensing Time, the program saw the screening of works by analog filmmakers from Taiwan, curated by Wu. Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino presented three of his films that are more like abstract, meditational journeys through time and space, aided by color and sound. The director pays homage to the analog viewing experience by highlighting the swirl of grains on cathode-ray-tube television screens when transmission is cut off.

Takashi Makino takes questions on his films at the Avant-Garde Now: Sensing Time event at M+. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Silke Schmickl, Chanel lead curator of Moving Image at M+, says that both Wu and Makino demonstrate “a strong focus on film as a time-based medium”, besides experimenting with “how film can be used as a tool to link different places and times and bring them all together through the editing process”.

Makino provides live sound for one of his films, Constellation — using 8K-scanned film noise to create a sound collage with the film’s piano soundtrack. Schmickl points out that “music is another time-based medium, where different elements are assembled” and that in Makino’s films music is meant to “inspire waves of emotion”, to a visceral effect.

Hong Kong artist Morgan Wong gave a lecture titled Some Thoughts on Time Dilation, followed by the screening of five films documenting some of his durational performances. In I Got Time, Wong is seen spending an entire day holding on to a cup of congealing concrete as he goes about his business. In Filing Down a Steel Bar Until a Needle is Made, the artist embarks on the Promethean task of shaving a steel bar that equals him in height and weight down to the size of a needle. Begun in 2015, this is still a work in progress, unsurprisingly.

Morgan Wong delivering a lecture at the M+-hosted Avant-Garde Now: Sensing Time event.(PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Wong’s artistic practice is marked by a silent resistance to “the constraints of time” binding human existence. In Plus-Minus-Zero, he is seen walking counterclockwise in snow-clad Sapporo, trying, literally, to turn the clock back. “Through my art, I am providing an alternative for the audience, or at least for myself, to experience the possibilities of other kinds of times,” Wong says.

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“I believe we are living on different time scales,” he adds. “Sometimes we are focused on a moment while at other times we look at time on a macro-level. Such constant shifts make me think about what time means to us at different times of our lives.”

basu@chinadailyhk.com