Experimental Time Order

Description:

Experimental Time Order was an exhibition by Black Quantum Futurism, a collective of multidisciplinary artists Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips. Through videos, publications, collages, sculptures, performances, and discursive events, Black Quantum Futurism engages in community-based projects that draw from quantum physics and Black/Afrodiasporic cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. For this exhibition, the collective presented a body of work that questioned how we can manipulate and collapse space-time in order to imagine, see, and manifest future realities in the present. 

Guided by the question “what temporal landscape does the clock embody?” the exhibition included mixed media collages, a reading station with Black Quantum Futurism publications, and their films All Time is Local (2019) and Time Travel Experiments (2017), which presented an instructional tutorial on do-it-yourself time travelling. The meditative and scientific qualities of time travel offered strategies to refuse, disrupt, and dismantle the Western mode of linear time—a system inseparable from a history of oppression through its role in regulating bodies, labour, and capital. Through an engagement with intersectional science fiction and non-Western time keeping rituals, the works in Experimental Time Order presented portals into everyday time travel as a way to regain control over one’s own temporality against the clock. 

Experimental Time Order was complemented by a talk with Ayewa, Phillips, and Hogan’s Alley Society co-chair Adam Rudder; followed by a performance by Ayewa and Phillips in the Grand Luxe Hall. An opening reception was held on September 12, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. 

Curated by Pablo de Ocampo.