Sub specie aeternitatis

How are you doing? Please come in. A step pyramid made of pickles. Three analogue clocks, none working, each one stopped at a different time. A small cabinet, complete with tschotchkes, film and a philosophical text, in Slovakian. All gathered together on a rectangle of black. The film is a meditation, on distance, death, and metaphysics, but above all on death. The question of mortality is here in various forms. Life is frozen the pickles, caught in their jar and unable to degrade, stacked up like batteries, but also in the clocks, so overtly not ticking. That the clock faces all register different times gives them a degree of individuality; not much, but as much as is enjoyed by gravestones, with their dates of birth and death. And above all in the video, with its tender shots of the hands of the artist’s grandmother, and the voice over by the artist’s uncle, all people who—one imagines—will precede us in crossing over to the other side. At first sight, this is a kind of thanatonic scenography. But it is entirely without melancholy. How is this possible? The answer is already in the recognition that this is a scene, a scene from a play. The artist is playing host, has set up a scene, has cued a conversation. And he wants you to go deep. This is a space not so much about death as it is against smalltalk. This is not art about death, but about impatience and warmth: impatience with privacy, boredom with coldness, for the cosmos, but against cosmopolitainism. This conversation can happen here, only once, only now. Now once again, how are you doing?

Text written by Dr. Adam Jasper