Our daily lives are structured by measurements of time. Calendar systems track the passage of weeks, months, and years, while clocks divide days into hours, minutes, and seconds. Yet, time, as we experience it, resists precise measurement—it can slow down, stretch, accelerate, or even spiral. As an art archive, we are interested in this tension between precision and elusiveness. We often ask ourselves if historical events and art histories have definitive beginnings and endings. And how might artists counter strict chronologies?
Countering Time has grown out of discussions with four artists and writers over the course of six months. The exhibition presents new works by Merve Ünsal, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Lee Weng Choy, who speculate on the immeasurability of time. Merve Ünsal uses her body to record a centuries-old sinkhole where human and geological time collapse. Simon Leung bends and folds the afterlives of a moment captured in a 1967 photograph from Hong Kong. Gala Porras-Kim traces recollections of lost works and archives. Lee Weng Choy uses personal annotations to mark time. Together, they tune in, refract, exhume, and annotate artworks, archival records, and past events, demonstrating how archives are sites of imagination instead of final resting places of historical records.
Venue address: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive