TIME is an exhibition exploring individual interpretations of time, and it will bridge the gap between our historical collections and contemporary culture. The exhibition will consist of a number of projects happening throughout the duration of the show, and it will include painting, photography, video, sculpture, performance, and objects of design.
Hernan Bas: A Queer and Curious Cabinet
Drawing from his extensive collection of objects, Hernan Bas will install a cabinet of curiosities at the Bass Museum of Art. Diverging from the typical aesthetics of historical curio cabinets, Bas’s installation will be site-specific and temporal. In a unique-designed cabinet construction, the artist will display objects from his substantial collection alongside items from the collection of the Bass Museum of Art. By extracting the objects from their native contexts, he will explore the connections that form as items are on view together. Forgoing specific timelines or narratives, his installation will reveal unexpected links between objects, illustrating the emotional significance and meaning inherent to each piece.
Manny Prieres: It was a Pleasure to Burn
For this project, Manny Prieres has reproduced by hand several covers of books that have been censored throughout history. Interested in how marginalized and taboo ideas evolve through time, Prieres further subverts each book by rendering them in dark graphite on black backgrounds. By using this subversive aesthetic language, Manny casts books widely embraced today—such as Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—in a negative light, reminding viewers of the disruptive power and fear that were once associated with each text.
Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus
Performance dates: December 4-8, 2013 during museum hours
For this project, Romania-based artists Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus will take up the historical collection of the Bass Museum of Art as a starting point, as well as the context of Art Basel Miami. Using only the help of a few human performers that will be present for the entire duration of the project, Pirici and Pelmus will examine and re-enact the works of art from the museum’s collection, substituting live presence and action for the material objects. This project will be the artists’ first major presentation since they enacted An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale at the Romanian Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale.
Selections among TIME
With a selection of photographs by Lorraine O’Grady, an intervention within the Egyptian collection will bring the Egyptian divine family King Osiris, Queen Isis and their son Horus and into a dialogue with a modern-day family with a parallel storyline of life and death which transcends time and space. Tracing movement throughout time, prints of Eadweard Muybridge’s ground-breaking work with moving images will also be on display. Cerith Wyn Evans’s chandelier fuses Victorian design, technology and an outdated communication method—Morse code—transmitting the contents of Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. The ticking of a digital clock is performed by hand in Torsten Lauschmann’s video Digital Clock (Growing Zeros), while we will also present a selection of dated clocks, ones that give evidence of their own passage through time.