<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Thank you for your introduction, Timothy. I love hearing about seasonal changes from the other side of world (we're moving into summer down here in New Zealand and I'm battling the last vestiges of spring hay fever). I also want to acknowledge that this cycle of election change has been particularly harrowing, as you say. I'm afraid my initial thoughts on the topic of duration are quite far removed from the difficult immediacies of the present moment, but I welcome any thoughts and responses that might frame this subject: Does the recent artistic celebration of 'deep time' risk overlooking the subjugated histories and experiences of indigenous peoples?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Just as I enjoy descriptions of autumnal leaves falling, I am also especially fond of first-hand descriptions of encountering 'deep time' geologies. The closing chapters of my book on time and contemporary art explore organic, ecological and geological durations that exist beyond the confines of human experience.</div><div class="gmail_default"><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">This 1788 passage from the naturalist John Playfair is a wonderfully breathless account of visiting a geological ‘unconformity’ on the Scottish coast:</div><div class="gmail_default">“An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">Robert Smithson reported a similar durational experience when visiting the site of his 1970 work Spiral Jetty:</div><div class="gmail_default">“As I looked to the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to quake. From the gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No idea, no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that phenomenological evidence.”</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">And finally, my own experience of finding an ammonite in the Himalayas in 2012:</div><div class="gmail_default">“Stone in hand, time split open. It unfurled into durations greater than the colossal mountain range that had once been a sea—waters that had once held a shell-less creature, now hardened in stone. I was just a speck, a body, a set of patterns, human striations, in the vast, dusty histories of time and space.”</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">Works of art by Darren Almond, Nicholas Mangan and Olafur Eliasson have similarly centred on seemingly wondrous encounters with geological durations or glacial deep time.</div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">But looking more critically at this artistic interest in deep time, I have wondered whether it risks the presumption of an absolute, universal frame of reference. Does it presuppose a primordial time that is rather conveniently indifferent to histories of social inequality and subjugation? More pointedly, when we celebrate the deep time of earth, do we actively overlook the durations and experiences of indigenous peoples? </div><div class="gmail_default"><br></div><div class="gmail_default">I very much welcome your thoughts and responses.</div><div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">- Kate</div></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"> </div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 at 08:29, Timothy Conway Murray <<a href="mailto:tcm1@cornell.edu">tcm1@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
Welcome to the end of fall, everyone. The last of the leaves are falling in Upstate New York and we are on the edges of our seats awaiting the US election results tomorrow night after an election cycle of harrowing, racist attacks on the world's most disenfranchised. The results of last week's election results in Brazil make us all the more nervous. Bizarrely, I too await my own election results as I am on tomorrow's ballot (unopposed, so no mystery) for election to my town council (I've always wanted to have a say in how to preserve snow plows and which potholes should be filled!).<br>
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But on a more serious note, I've chosen to moderate this month as a follow-up to the deeply thoughtful conversations that have been catalyzed by artworks and performances mounted over the past three months for the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, which I have curated under the same theme as we'll have for this month's discussion: Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival. I'll say more about that as the week and month progresses, but for now just want to say that many of the participating artists have agreed to join us after this week.<br>
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For this week, I am joined by three international curators and theoreticians whose work probes the extent of duration across the arts and philosophy. Their experiences and projects across the globe -- New Zealand, Singapore, Canada -- should provide our discussion with some exciting framing about how duration has been throught within the arts and digital culture. So welcome to our discussion, featured guests, Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand), Justine Kohleal (Canada), Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore).<br>
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Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers (New Zealand)<br>
Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers is a contemporary art historian, public engagement specialist and arts writer based in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2017, she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis at the University of Auckland. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art published by Intellect and distributed through Chicago University Press. She has lectured at the University of Auckland and AUT University, worked as a curator at Artspace, NZ and currently manages a public engagement team at Auckland Transport. Her book, Time,<br>
Duration and Change in Contemporary Art, presents a major study of time as a key aesthetic dimension of recent art practices. This book explores different aspects of time across a broad range of artistic media and draws on recent movements in philosophy, science, and technology to show how artists generate temporal experiences that resist the standardized time of modernity: Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs produce fragile temporal ecologies; Marina Abramović’s performances test the durations of the human body; Christian Marclay’s The Clock conflates past and present chronologies. This book examines alternative frameworks of time, duration, and change in prominent philosophical, scientific, and technological traditions, including physics, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, media theory, and selected environmental sciences. It suggests that art makes a crucial contribution to these discourses not by “visualizing” time, but by entangling viewers in different sensory, material, and imaginary temporalities.<br>
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Justine Kohleal (Canada).<br>
Justine Kohleal is a Toronto-based curator and art critic. Prior to her appointment as RBC Curatorial Fellow at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Kohleal worked as an independent curator and arts writer in Edmonton, Alberta. Select past curatorial projects include [INTERFACE] (Fringe Gallery, Edmonton); No Job More Dangerous and Intellectual Play (dc3 Art Projects, Edmonton); Sounding the Alarm: The Poetics of Connection (Art Gallery of Ontario); and Beth Stuart: Length, Breadth, Thickness and—Duration (The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery). She acted as a curatorial assistant to Gerald McMaster and Denise Birkhofer at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto for The Faraway Nearby: Photographs of Canada from The New York Times Photo Archive and to writer and curator Kari Cwynar for Duane Linklater’s installation Monsters for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality (Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto). She has interned with The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Centre for American Art and with the Art Gallery of Ontario. Kohleal holds a curatorial M.F.A from OCAD University and a B.A. from the University of Alberta with a focus in Art, Design, and Visual Culture. Currently, her research focuses on the intersection of space, the body/senses and boredom within performance-based art and curatorial practice.<br>
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Elizabeth Wijaya (US/Singapore)<br>
Elzabeth Wijaya is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Languages and Literature of the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University in August 2018. Her research interests are in film-philosophy, ecocinema, and cinematic time. She is working on her book manuscript "Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Chinese Cinema." She co-edited a Special issue of Parallax "Survival of the Death Sentence" in which she contributed an article "To See Die Again: The Act of Filming and The Act of Killing." She has also published in Derrida Today. She is a co-founder of E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company: <a href="http://ewfilms.com.sg" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">ewfilms.com.sg</a>. Her co-directed feature-length film, I Have Loved, competed at international film festivals including the Shanghai International Film Festival.<br>
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Timothy Murray<br>
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial<br>
<a href="http://cca.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://cca.cornell.edu</a><br>
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art <br>
<a href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu</a> <<a href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/</a>><br>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English<br>
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B-1 West Sibley Hall<br>
Cornell University<br>
Ithaca, New York 14853<br>
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empyre forum<br>
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