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Selection by Natalia Vargas, asistente curatorial
THE SHAPES OF TIME
In ancient times, observing the sky was a way of understanding the world. Cultures such as the Egyptians and the Mayans developed complex systems of measuring time based on the movement of the stars and the moon. More than an astronomical tool, time was an organizing principle of life that governed agricultural cycles, religious rituals, and the changing of the seasons. The need to record and ritualize the passage of time was also inscribed in materials. Funerary art, calendars carved in stone, commemorative monuments—all were attempts to immortalize a moment, to resist the erosion of oblivion. In materials like bronze and stone, various cultures not only commemorated major events, but also attempted to challenge the transience of life itself. Later, in European painting, the memento mori (the reminder that you’ll die) became a visual way of thinking about time, represented by skulls, hourglasses, and withered flowers—symbols that recalled the inevitability of death and the transience of life. These images didn’t measure time; they warned of it.
G. Ulbricht’s painting from 1825, which inspired the work Clocked Perspective (2012) by Anri Sala, follows a similar line of thought. Ulbricht depicts a landscape featuring a clock on the facade of a castle. In the composition, the structure’s perspective is distorted, allowing the clock to remain frontal. Sala brings this perceptual rupture into three dimensions in Clocked Perspective. He physically deforms a clock so that, depending on the angle from which it is viewed, it looks distorted or correct. In this way, time becomes a changing visual experience, a symbol of the altered regulation of time in contemporary life. Today, constant connectivity and the immediacy of technology have imposed an accelerated pace on our lives, often in tension with the body’s natural rhythms. In her book Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art Beyond the Clock, writer Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers claims that our dependence on measured time has transformed everyday life to the point where we can tell the time without looking at the clock. 1 This ability to understand time from a physical perspective demonstrates how an internalized abstract concept governs our lives.
This tension between a natural time—organic, cyclical, corporal—and another artificial time—measured, digital, accelerated—is at the heart of Reloj I (2003) by Pablo Vargas Lugo. In this installation, three monitors mark the passage of the day at different rhythms, guided by sequences of prime numbers. The result is an unstable time, impossible to synchronize. The artist questions how the technology that organizes our lives can also fragment them, highlighting the friction between bodies, perceptions, and machines. In this way, Vargas Lugo reflects on the latent possibility of creating new realities that go beyond social conventions, linked to a society whose value is centered on the capacity for production and consumption so heavily developed since the Industrial Revolution.
PRODUCTIVE TIME

During the Industrial Revolution, the cyclical conception of time changed radically. In the West, the old conception of time was replaced by a linear and quantifiable one, where the clock and the calendar were imposed as standards of the new capitalist order, governed by mass production. The clock—until then a symbol of reflection or vanity—became a tool of control. In factories, bodies were synchronized with machines. The sensation of running “against the clock,” that’s so familiar to us today, began then. This dynamic was portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), in which he parodies the speed and disconnection of modern times, highlighting the loss of control over the body and life, as well as the dehumanizing effects of industrialization.

From this context of constant speed and transformation came artistic languages capable of incorporating time more directly. The invention of cinema in 1895 marked a turning point: now, time could not only be represented but also manipulated, edited, and reproduced. Thus, art began to exist not as a permanent object but as an ephemeral, living, and constantly changing experience.

As historian Jonathan Crary points out, this new temporality imposed different forms of attention. Perception was no longer linear, but fragmentary, fluctuating, conditioned by interruptions, repetitions, and simultaneous stimuli. 4 This interest in capturing movement was also evident in avant-garde painting. In Futurism, works such as Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) by Giacomo Balla and Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) by Marcel Duchamp sought to represent movement in still images, creating visual sequences that evoked time, energy, and repetition. 4

SUBJECTIVE TIME

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of conceptual art—an artistic period in which ideas were prioritized over form—several artists began to experiment with the ephemeral and mutable nature of time, exploring its expressive potential beyond the forms that had traditionally assumed permanence in durable materials, like marble or stone. Innovations included the development of performance art and temporary installations, in addition to the use of new technologies. Artwork shifted from being oriented toward permanence to being focused on duration, repetition, and disappearance.

Video art was key in this transformation. Artists such as Nam June Paik and Douglas Gordon used the moving image to slow down, repeat, or distort the flow of time. These strategies questioned the accelerated pace of contemporary visual culture and proposed a sensory, emotional, and subjective dimension to time. In this way, they sought to demonstrate that time is a subjective, fragmented, and human experience. It is, after all, a language that connects us all, but perhaps one of the most difficult to understand. 5

“Time dilation,” proposed by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, warns that time does not flow uniformly for everyone, but rather stretches or compresses depending on the point of view and relative motion. Beyond its scientific formulation, this idea is a metaphor for how we experience time differently. 6 Artists such as Vito Acconci and On Kawara, from different but complementary approaches, explored this complexity in their works. In Blinks (1969), Acconci radicalizes the notion of time by turning an automatic and imperceptible gesture like blinking into a unit of measurement. By capturing his blinks, Acconci documents the unseen. Like commas in a sentence, blinks interrupt the continuity of the act of seeing, turning the absent instant into an archive. In this gesture, he seeks to record a process, an ephemeral duration, a form of fragmented perception that stretches the notion of the present.

Similarly, On Kawara delved into how humans experience and record time, dedicating his work to investigating its existential and spatial dimensions through the use of language and numbers. Through a meticulous series documenting his routines, he transformed time into an artistic subject. In I Got Up (1968–1979), the artist sent two postcards a day bearing the phrase “I GOT UP AT” followed by his waking time, rendering an intimate act visible and shared through this repetitive format. Similarly, in his most iconic series, Date Paintings (since 1966), he painted the exact date he made these monochromatic canvases, which he destroyed if he failed to complete them before midnight.

Kawara’s art is an exercise in presence that questions the way we understand time, inviting us to experience it consciously and poetically. Each painted date is a meticulous gesture that opens a pause. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, Kawara doesn’t measure time, but rather shapes it. 7 In each act, there is a pause, a poetic way of inhabiting the present.

RECORDED TIME

In the 1990s, new thinking emerged that responded to contemporary labor practices. Work time was no longer guided by the mechanical clock, as it was in factories. Instead, it was measured by digital devices and online platforms that demanded the constant availability of the workforce. Unlike industrial workers, who operated with their bodies and within limited time frames, the cognitive workers bring subjectivity into the production process. The Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, in his book The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, asks why the post-industrial worker accepts, even yearns for, the extension of their workday. This new condition has generated deeper forms of alienation, since what is being explored is not just the body, but the soul, the capacity to think, feel, and create. Work time becomes indefinite and is confused with one’s life. 9 This temporary transformation affects work life, as well as our bodily and emotional experiences.

The human body becomes a place where time manifests itself in material and affective forms. Several decades later, contemporary art continues to cultivate the capacity to understand time as a variable that forms part of the work. Various artists have approached this tangible, corporeal dimension of time from different angles, revealing how it shapes identities, memories, and materials.

“Fotografío mi cuerpo. Lo generalizo al omitir la cabeza, para que mi cuerpo sea como el de cualquier otro hombre. La desnudez elimina cualquier referencia temporal; desnudo, pertenece al pasado, al presente y al futuro”.
– John Coplans
In Self Portrait, Frieze No. 4, Three Panels (1994), John Coplans photographed his body, presenting it as a map on which time has left its mark. Copplans works are memento mori in the traditional sense, in that they are images which remind us of our own mortality. By not showing his face, he seeks to universalize his body. The focus on bodily details is somewhat reminiscent of classical sculptures such as Myron’s Discobolus—symbols of idealized beauty portrayed for posterity. But Coplans inverts that legacy: His aging body doesn’t exalt perfection, but rather makes visible what society prefers to conceal. As he himself noted, his images address “body politics” in the sense that “oldness” is a taboo in American society, which tends to worship beauty and youth, consequently the aging of old bodies must be hidden from view, for they are imperfect, very often diseased and will soon perish. 10 His Self-Portrait series is not only a testament to aging, but a reminder that inhabiting a body also means inhabiting time.
Desde otra perspectiva, Rineke Dijkstra, en su serie The Foreign Legion (2000), documenta la transformación física y emocional de Olivier Silva, un joven que pasa tres años en la Legión Extranjera Francesa. Con su estilo documental, Dijkstra reveló las huellas sutiles del cambio en la personalidad, la expresión y la postura de su retratado, mostrando la evolución en este período. Esta serie evidencia la pérdida de control sobre el propio cuerpo y el tiempo, subrayando los aspectos deshumanizantes de la estricta vida militar y a la vez da una mirada profundamente humana sobre la transición y la vulnerabilidad. El tiempo deja de ser una medida cronológica para convertirse en una fuerza que moldea la identidad.
Por su parte, a través de 101 retratos que documentan la vida desde la infancia hasta la vejez, la obra de Hans Peter Feldmann, 100 Years (2001) propone una representación visual del ciclo vital, que abarca desde la infancia hasta la vejez. Cada imagen, dispuesta en orden ascendente, permite recorrer la existencia como un proceso continuo e irreversible. El tiempo aparece aquí como una progresión lineal, marcada por etapas que, sin posibilidad de retroceso, construyen un retrato universal de la vida humana.
TIEMPO REPETIDO
En nuestra sociedad moderna, obsesionada con la productividad y el progreso, la repetición suele percibirse como un estancamiento, algo que se opone al avance. Sin embargo, ninguna iteración es exactamente igual a la anterior, pues cada una ocurre en un momento distinto, en un lugar distinto. Repetir es, de algún modo avanzar. Cada repetición contiene una variación, por mínima que sea: un desvío, una diferencia en el continuo del tiempo. 11 En la serie Untitled (Barragán House, #35) (2005), Luisa Lambri presenta una secuencia de fotografías de una misma ventana en la Casa Luis Barragán, en las que varía sutilmente la posición de las contraventanas. En cada imagen, la luz se filtra de forma distinta, generando una composición repetitiva que, al igual que en el cine, construye una narrativa temporal. Aunque cada toma es autónoma, en conjunto revelan desplazamientos, duraciones y variaciones mínimas que, acumuladas, hacen visible el paso del tiempo.

El tiempo no sólo se mide, también se transforma y se materializa. Kalender (2011) de Katinka Bock da forma al tiempo a través de arcilla. Cada día, la artista creó un cubo basado en su memoria del anterior. A lo largo de la exposición, los cubos se desplazaron por la sala, formando un calendario material que refleja el paso del tiempo y su intervención en la materia. En este caso, el tiempo se experimenta como desgaste y acumulación, una transformación constante que deja huella en el espacio físico. 12 Por medio de esta repetición, se hace visible el transcurrir del tiempo cuando una obra de arte cambia mientras la observamos.

El tiempo ha sido medido, narrado, ritualizado y administrado. Ha servido para organizar cosechas, sincronizar máquinas, marcar calendarios y coordinar vidas. Pero más allá de relojes, el tiempo nos atraviesa como memoria, como pérdida, como espera, como cambio. Desde sus inicios, el arte ha intentado capturar esta experiencia múltiple y contradictoria del tiempo: a veces para desafiar su fugacidad, otras para rendirse a ella. En las obras que exploran duraciones, fragmentos corporales, ritmos alterados o ciclos vitales, el tiempo deja de ser una línea recta y se convierte en un campo de tensiones, en lenguaje visual, en experiencia encarnada. Hoy, en un mundo donde el tiempo parece cada vez más homogéneo y acelerado, el arte sigue abriendo fisuras que permiten pausar, mirar y habitar un presente más sensible. Nos recuerda que hay otros ritmos posibles, más humanos, más inciertos, más vivos.

Texto de Natalia Vargas, asistente curatorial, Museo Jumex.

1 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art, 7 de enero de 2019, 33–38, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv36xvwqb.

2 Amy Cappellazzo, Adriano Pedrosa, y Peter Wollen, Making Time: Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video & Film (Lake Worth, FL: Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, 2000).

3 Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).

4 Barbara Kaesbohrer, “Time as Space; Visualizing Time in Painting, Sculpture, or Video Art,” Time and Space, 25 de octubre de 2023, 289–93, https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003260554-42.

5 Amelia Groom, ed., Time, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (Londres: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010).

6 Rags Media Collective, “Cosmic Glow, Dissenting Tongues: A Practice with Paradoxes and Silences,” Journal #155, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/155/675031/cosmic-glow-dissenting-tongues-a-practice-with-paradoxes-and-silences.

7 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Technique of the Present,” in Time, ed. Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 104–115.

8 Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009).

9 Ibid.

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