Artists

Cevdet Erek, Mario García Torres, Renata Lucas, Mike Nelson, Shilpa Gupta

Press release

In NowJustPassedBy, a group exhibition featuring works by Cevdet Erek, Mario García Torres, Shilpa Gupta, Renata Lucas, Mike Nelson and Rirkrit Tiravanija, divergent notions of time and its structure reveal a multivalent capacity to mold our experience of the present. Linear, circular or hypothetical temporal models collide with the instantaneous and the spatial, shaping interfaces that prompt reimagination of chronology’s persistent forward momentum, materializing its intangible potential as sculptural manifestations.

Shilpa Gupta’s wall-mounted, neon-lit work NowJustPassedBy (2023) serves as the point of departure for this presentation, both in title and concept. The eponymous phrase, authored by the artist, centers “now” as an ever-shifting, uniquely individuated moment, while the work’s mirrored image emphasizes the close link between movement, perspective and interpretation. The present is likewise at the core of Cevdet Erek’s Ruler 100 Years 2023 (with Calendar and Alphabet Revolution) and Ruler 100 Years 2023 (both 2023): paired rulers whose abilities to measure space are supplanted by the capacity to enumerate time. With their shared year of conception as anchors, regular markings plot a reductionist calendar that encapsulates everything from the minutiae of the lives lived within the former’s bounds to the potential held by the latter’s coming century. Integrating his extensive work as a musician and sound engineer, Erek’s rulers are accompanied by a modified daf drum. Adorned along its frame by metal rings joined as suspended chains, a cryptic system of notation takes shape, paced and measured in a looped advance, codifying and recalling ephemeral action. The three hand-blown glass rings of Mario García Torres’s Fragment of An Infinite Discourse (n.d.) too visualize time as an unending cycle, passing through one another to portray infinitude as an interdependent, delicate system.