Tate Modern Level 4
6 October 2004 – 2 January 2005
Time Zones will be the first major exhibition at Tate Modern devoted exclusively to film and video. The show, which opens on 6 October 2004, will feature the work of ten international artists: Fikret Atay; Francis Alÿs; Yael Bartana; Yang Fudong; Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij; Anri Sala; Bojan Sarcevic; Wolfgang Staehle; and Fiona Tan. The majority of the work has never been seen in this country and the show will provide a unique opportunity to see the latest developments in a range of contemporary film and video selected from around the world.
The works included in Time Zones offer a contrasting approach to the representation and role of time than that seen in more commercial media. Using a range of techniques and methods to mimic the passing of time or to enhance a sense of longevity, the artists in Time Zones examine and describe the specific tempo of a particular place at a particular time. The exhibition features work from locations in Turkey, Albania, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, China, Israel, Bangkok, and Germany.
These themes are explored by Bojan Sarcevic in Untitled (Bangkok) 2003, a film of the artist walking through the streets of Bangkok, and by Anri Sala in Blindfold, a double projection of the reflection of the setting sun on a building in Tirana, Albania, in which the near-total absence of camera movement appears to freeze the scene. Fiona Tan’s Rain, a study of an Indonesian street corner during the monsoon, shows the artist reflecting meditatively, using nature to establish a primary source for marking time. Dutch collaborative team, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, feature a single shot of a graveyard behind which looms the Asian city, Jarkatta and Wolfgang Staehle will be represented by his live-feed image of the medieval Comburg monastery, Germany, in which he contrasts the apparently outmoded time of the monastery’s schedule with the immediacy brought about by a live-feed net transmission. The show will also include a twelve-hour video by Belgian born, Mexico-based Francis Alÿs, Zocalo, in which the flagpole at the centre of Mexico City’s main plaza acts like a giant sundial.
The plurality of times (past, present and future) that exist within contemporary society at any one moment will be examined in a number of works. Yang Fudong’s video captures the confusion behind the cultural transformation that China has undergone in recent years. Israeli-born Yael Bartana examines the cultural and economic values of her native country in Kings of the Hill and Fikret Atay’s Rebels of the Dance 2002 features two young boys performing a traditional folk song in the booth of an automatic bank teller machine in his home town of Batman in the far east of Turkey.
Time Zones is co-curated by Jessica Morgan, Curator, Tate Modern and Gregor Muir, Kramlich Curator of Contemporary Art, Tate. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book with essays by the curators. It will also include philosophical and cultural critical contributions from Peter Osborne, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, Sylviane Agachinski, professor at Ecole des hautes Etudes in Paris and Irit Rogoff, professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College.