Timescape / time landscape

Solo exhibition
Curator: Irena Bekić
13/3-22/4/2023
Podroom Gallery
Kultural Centre Belgrade

The exhibition has been realised as a collaborative effort by the Art Pavilion in Zagreb and Cultural Centre of Belgrade. 

The forms of temporality and perception of time are in the focus of interest for artist Neli Ružić. In her exhibition Timescape, she thematizes heterogeneity of time. In this, the artist builds on the idea that all temporal streams, i.e. the multitude of them, are simultaneous, and we are touched by or immersed in many of them, even though not all of them are simultaneously and equally fathomable or attainable to us.

The term of timescape, i.e. temporal landscape, indicates space as a necessity in comprehending time, or explaining its multiplicity. Furthermore, landscape involves a view, perspective, and other, so thereby also society, encounters, or communities, as well as relations shaped in time and in turn, shaping the time. 

The author transforms the space of the gallery into an experimental venue, a temporal laboratory cut across with the axes of heterogeneous time. Tour of the gallery is marked with the shifting rhythms of individual human, historical, dystopian and scientific time, acceleration caused by the capitalist demand for productivity, replaced with contemplation inviting us, finally, to slow down.  

„… Neli starts from the idea that all timelines or a plurality of them are simultaneous, that we are touched by or immersed in many of them even though not all of them are fathomable or accessible to us at the same time. The temporal structure she presupposes is no longer vertical or horizontal. It is spatialised in multiple directions, building spatial and conceptual networks that include both in front and behind, above and across, now and before, sensations and relationships. Therefore, Neli’s works about time, always concern space. Whether she uses it as an artistic material, symbolic framework or product, it is always a constitutive part of her strategy. …”

(excerpts from the curatorial text by Irena Bekić)

Photo: Tanja Drobnjak@KCB