Convened by BAK’s curator of public practice Rachael Rakes with artist-interlocutors Femke Herregraven, Jumana Manna, and Claudia Martínez Garay, as well as writer Amelia Groom, the project calls upon a wide range of practitioners who examine and embody alternate scales, rhythms, and conceptions of temporal experience in order to explore how looking and working beyond linear, progressive, and globally-synchronized time can contribute to a more plurally-determined and sustainable existence. The project explores concepts such as “deep time,” “seed time,” “ancestral time,” “cyclical time,” “local time,” “crip time,” “queer time,” and “non-human time” in order to imagine escapes from the programmatic movement of capitalist modernity toward ostensibly inevitable catastrophe.
No Linear Fucking Time aims to isolate the abstract, progressive conception of time in terms of its fundamental role in colonization, exploitation, and cultural flattening, and its foreclosure of equities and agencies for a range of cultures and beings. When time is seen instead as the co-extant unfolding of relations, sensitivities might be honed toward other avenues of the possible. The project posits that just as time has been a homogenizing imperial force, the rethinking of time can be a key function of anti-colonial presents.
The artists in the project each deal with critical conceptions of time in their own work, through drawing, painting, formed and found objects, machines, documentary and moving image practice, and a variety of creative visual and textual speculations. Artist-interlocutors Herregraven, Manna, and Martínez Garay present newly-commissioned work and also act as co-researchers and programmers, participating in convening events and bringing the broader field of theirs and related research together. Alongside them are several practitioners whose works will be presented in the exhibition through discursive and performative events. Three projects unfold additionally in off-site Utrecht locations in 2022, in collaboration with artists Mascini, Schuppli, and Tolaas, and partner organizations including Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht and others.
Accompanying the exhibition and public program is the latest focus of BAK’s online research platform, Prospections, co-edited with Amelia Groom, featuring newly commissioned texts, archival resources, interviews, and artistic contributions from and with Black Quantum Futurism, Walidah Imarisha, Elizabeth Freeman , JJJJJerome Ellis, Adriana Knouf, Jason Allen-Paisant, Marianne Shaneen, Timur Si-Qin, and Joel Spring, among others. Finally, a culminating symposium takes place in April 2022.
