The Hands of God

Galleri Verkilgheten Umeå, Sweden

“In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change — which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end — into time as we know it.” – Hannah Arendt

It seems apt, in this tragic, strange and disorienting period of the pandemic, to think of time in relation to human lifespan and the biblical number of people whose time has been shortened, as well as the seemingly slowing down of time as a consequence of our restricted freedom to move and to produce.

For centuries, men and women within the fields of science and the humanities attempted to find the answer to the true nature of time. Albert Einstein, during a lecture in 1922 where he presented his Relativity Theory, famously said that, “The time of the philosophers does not exist”. This led to a lifetime debate on the nature of time between him and the philosopher Henri Bergson, who was present during the lecture and was provoked by the bold statement.  Einstein was content with the thinking that time was what clocks measured. He believed in a spatial understanding of time. Suggesting that any other notion of time, including a philosophical one, was not real and not objective. He believed that for physicists, the distinction between the past, the present and the future, is just an illusion.

Bergson, on the other hand, wanted a notion of time that included the emergence of new things. He was in favor of a more human notion of time and suggested that without a prior human experience of time, clock would not have any purpose and would just be bits of machinery used for our amusement. He says time is action itself, the emergence of something new via action. While he did not question the theories that the physicists of that period presented, he believed that their concept and understanding of time is not complete.

“Timely Pieces” gathers together a group of artists whose practice touches upon the different ideas and experience of time.