In a world where the digital and physical reality intermingle seamlessly,
where every click, tap, and swipe unveils a universe of information,
how can we keep the time of imagination?
Imagine and reimagine the world anew

What is to be understood by ‘time’

Throughout history, our understanding of time has undergone profound transformations.

Before the invention of the clock, time was intertwined with the rhythms of nature, everyday activities, and localities. In his book, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps – Empires of Time, Peter Galison writes that back in 1880, even in locations a few hundred kilometres apart, time was not the same – Geneva time would be 10:30, while the clocks in Paris indicated 10:15, and the people of Bern believed it to be 10:35¹. The differences were relatively small, but still recognisable, and from the perspective of the history of science, Galison states that time was neither singular nor standardized.

These differences in time were eradicated by one of the scientific advancements in the wake of the discovery of electromagnetism – electrical time keeping. As railroads expanded and military movements demanded coordinated departure and arrival across vast distances, the unification of time became a priority and reinforced the modernist ideal of “universal time.” Following the detachment of time from the human body, ignoring the relationship with life, social and cultural structures, and local contexts, time transformed into a standardized singular concept. While time was mechanised, mathematised, systematised, capitalised and institutionalised.

Rethinking and Rematerialising Time

In my previous essays², I drew attention to artistic and philosophical perspectives of time, referring to the Japanese listening technique, Mimi o Sumasu³, and proposed that the curatorial – driven by the power of poetics – should facilitate non-linear, multidimensional experiences of time. In my quest for new vocabularies for the rematerialisation of time, I introduced the notion of “artistic time,” a time that is sticky and seeks to adhere to another scale of time and form new temporalities. In such an epistemological way of understanding time, time cannot simply be divided, categorised, or thematised by geography, history, and cultural context. It does not even belong to a specific period or any linear genealogy. Instead, time emerges out of the potential of relationship without relation.

In the extension of my previous works, my curatorial proposition to the Asian Triennale Manchester 6 deals with the transvaluation of time – a call for “artistic time,” to materialise time differently and continue the search for the language to articulate the nuances and intricacies of artistic time. In the age of digital relational technology, time penetrates or bypasses the body by the speed of digital networks. Reflecting the intricate ties of everyday life to relational technology, time is more than ever the pivotal point for new forms of capitalism in digital culture. The systemic segmentation and optimisation of time for a calculated pursuit of efficiency and economic gain methodically accelerate the segmentation of time and directly impact the aesthetics of everyday life. In contrast, artistic time allows us to unlink the hyper-industrial relation between capital, labour, information, and knowledge. It invites us to reconfigure time in more associative and imaginative manners, fostering new ways of experiencing and actively reclaiming temporalities.

Pursuing this train of thought, in the conceptual framework of ATM6 –Transvaluation, I initiate three artistic projects by seven female artists: 1) Performative events and installations, newly produced in collaboration with poet Hiromi Itō, Butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki, improvisational musician Kanoko Nishi, and visual artists Sae Esashi and Tomoko Mori; 2) a film installation and performative event, commissioned to visual and performance artist Yuriko Sasaoka and 3) a series of soft sculptures made of wool by visual and performance artist Ziliä Qansurá.

Hiromi Itō is one of the most acclaimed contemporary poets and a pioneering feminist voice in Japan. For more than two decades, she has been living in Poland and the United States and is currently back in Kumamoto, her hometown in Japan. For ATM6, Itō is working on a new novel centred around the legendary 9th-century female Japanese poet Ono no Komachi. Komachi was renowned for her exceptional intelligence, exquisite poetry, elegant calligraphy, and striking beauty, but as she grew old, her life became marked by poverty, and she is said to have died a beggar. Based on the long investigation on Komachi’s life, poems, legends, and myths, Itō juxtaposes her own life experiences with Komachi’s, connecting the life of a woman living more than 1200 years ago to the contemporary. With Hiromi Itō’s imagination and the power of poetry, her work will penetrate centuries, linking, synchronising, and merging two temporalities into one – artistic time through the lens of women’s lives and their political, social, and cultural positions in society. This novel will be translated into English by Jeffrey Angels and presented at a series of improvisational actions and performative installations – blending poetry, bodily movement, visuals, and sound, and inviting the audience to take part. We envision the project as a dynamic and collaborative “jam session,” where artistic time is collectively reclaimed by the author, a dancer, visual artists, a musician, and the public in Manchester, using multiple senses and sensors.