Installation_Videos_Text Projection-Participatory Elements
Exhibition: arttransponder project room Berlin 2007, (publication)
What is “time?”, a movement, a relation to space, a universal structure, relational diversity, a “now,” which more than ever, is continuously “hopping?” Is really everything a matter of time?
With this multilayer installation work I am researching the production of time within subjective perception.
By looking for hidden moments beyond the experience structured for us I am questioning existing time concepts, which often demand efficiency and productivity and their processes of evaluation.
http://vladmorariu.wordpress.com/texts/tatjana-fell-on-the-flow-of-time
Photos
time | productivity | systems of validation
In collaboration with Nina Lundström, we asked friends and interested visitors to create a product without sense via a knitting process.
Passed time became visible through a process of production and was integrated in the exhibition. Visitors finished or proceeded on the knitting piece what others had worked beforehand, not knowing what for but with a visible result
text projection_video loop
perpetual shifting – continuous space – building timeframes – setting limits – living within borders – now – then – yesterday – tomorrow – neverever – yet – lost in the flow – falling – drowning – dissolving – scanning – locating – navigating – making decisions – creating time – living in time – yet
text projection_video loop
perpetual shifting – continuous space – building timeframes – setting limits – living within borders – now – then – yesterday – tomorrow – neverever – yet – lost in the flow – falling – drowning – dissolving – scanning – locating – navigating – making decisions – creating time – living in time – yet
Video stills
videostills perpetual shifting
During our lifetime we need to discover and reveal our own personality and find a personal approach to life.
Mainly covered by a selfmade mask of delusions it takes our action and time to uncover the ties.
Texts
Tatjana Fell in the flow of time – Vlad Morariu
Time will explain it all. He is a talker,
and needs no questioning before he speaks.
Euripides
The main character in Michael Ende’s book, Momo, a poor orphan who lives in an amphitheater on the outskirts of a large city, is described by the German author as the last survivor of a society in which people can still enjoy the taste of time. The child is witness to a process in the course of which the capitalist way of thinking, whose logic is based on principles of efficiency and the accumulation of value, slowly replaces an attitude based on the joy of play and storytelling. As things stand, Ende’s book is a prophecy of our present history, whose scientific, relativity-supporting approach finds its counterpart in another kind of relativity that measures past moments in spent capital, a link between time and money. But, as the book ultimately argues for a happy ending, with Momo freeing the stolen lilies of the hour and returning them to their proper owners, here the story turns into a game of liberated identities finding their way out of ignorance to regain the gift of being able to look into their own hearts.
It is tempting to think of Momo as the prototype of the artist:
an inventive person with imaginative thinking who contributes to society through the great power of being able to listen and understand, who takes the side of the underprivileged – a bricklayer, a landlady, a street sweeper, a tourist guide – someone who (credibly) creates scenarios whose possibility alternatives become reality. But, if this assumption is true, should we think of the artist as the one best placed to bring us back to ourselves through the recovery of lost (or stolen) time?
A look at Tatjana Fell’s works, which were created as part of the exhibition Auf dem Boden der Zeit, provides an opportunity to put these ideas to the test. Or rather, since the circle of interpretation moves in spirals: in viewing these works, an opportunity is constituted to remember a history of innocence in which the life value of an aesthetic of time is represented, in a journey from the outside of the world of life to the inside of the heart, which is revealed in an artistic way; to return to the reflections of the artist herself and to put them in a new light.
It turns out that Tatjana Fell had chosen a task that is both the simplest and the most difficult. An indication of this difficulty can already be found in the Confessions of St. Francis. The Christian philosopher explains his own inability by posing the question of the nature of time, thereby placing the person being questioned in the paradoxical position of being able to answer but not having an answer: If I am asked what time is, I cannot answer; but if I am not asked, I may be able to give an answer. Or – if I may continue this line of argument – if no one asks what time is, then someone could point out its nature. The ontology is one of signs and symbols.
A first step into the gallery space, and one cannot help but notice a refusal of grammatical coherence, a suspicion of the construction of a discourse. It is as if it is to be feared that the language could rebel against the origin of its own being – against the expressing subject, the artist herself. Because language claims its autonomy as soon as it is in the world. Instead, the artist opts for the middle way between answering this ontological question and limiting herself to mere signs; words therefore flow across the wall, reified as images.
Through this process of reification, they become objects of fictional case studies for every other human experience.
The artist shows, hints at, creates text-images of her own conceptual system, which materialize on the wall to the left, from one side to the other, in a passage of matter and time, appearing and disappearing just as they had come. In the narrative context, already defined by art space and artwork, these words lose their origin and become examples of what Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia, the polyphony of language, a virtuality of words uttered by an infinite number of entities, out of the realms of society, regardless of their status: perpetual shifting – continuous space – building timeframes – setting limits – living within borders – now – then – yesterday – tomorrow – never-ever – yet – lost in the flow – falling – drowning – dissolving – scanning – locating – navigating – making decisions – creating time – living in time – yet.Words to remember.
But what seems to be wrapped up here only as unconscious knowledge unfolds further and undisguised. A living sculpture made up of a multitude of voices that creates communal structures from threads and wires. People sit and talk to each other once they have agreed to play the game. For here, work is freed from its social necessity and turned into its opposite, which is configured as free time that is not to be wasted in the same way that stolen time becomes the measure of efficiency, but as a willingness to leave it to others. From Bakhtin’s point of view, this could be the only place where such a carnival could take place – a carnival, a celebration, a communal explosion of joy, an escape from normality, a transfiguration of the ordinary. The core of this work lies in a play of the imagination with its own possibilities, supplemented by the will to approach the other with the least that one has to offer. What the artist is striving for here is not an experiment, but an exercise in trusting the hermeneutic circle – what is at stake – understanding the other in order to better understand oneself. There is no teleology here, just as there is no final form for the knitted nest. Time becomes a frame of reference, a background waiting for people to approach this work and the rest that falls into oblivion, while knitting becomes the joy of a shared encounter.
And finally there is the abandoned amphitheater. An orphaned scene – the actors have left, or, to use Tatjana Fell’s words, an open studio in which the artist is missing. Little Momo left the amphitheater for days, years, eternities to travel to the Nowhere House – from a logical point of view, Nowhere has the same chances of suddenly breaking through to its existence as Everywhere – where she would eventually meet Master Secundus Minutius Hora – but this is just another me ta pher for a significant immersion into the void of time, which is always also a confrontation with one’s own subjectivity. To the
Tatjana Fell has left the place and the only traces she has left behind are fragments of a former life, which manifest themselves moment by moment in artistic works. A human life, an artist’s life as a measure of time: a rocket that is fired and immediately explodes – the image of a breath as a drop in the galactic ocean; an endlessly repeated gesture of covering and uncovering a woman’s face with the help of an endless thread – a uniform movement like a constant gliding past, the same beat, the same measure of movement, in contrast to the hectic pace in which we live, a prerequisite for an exotic philosophy of detachment and an exercise in wisdom [sagesse]The ability to understand that everything comes and goes and nothing ever stays, or in other words, a strategy to secure oneself; a television program without transmission, or rather, the absence of prefabricated images is the actual transmission, or better still, a Brownian movement of tiny units, foreboding intersections in chance, a touching of existences that greet each other in a never-ending movement, a way of thinking about time for microscopic empires that we can never see. Time has marked this studio and left it in clinical order, everything in its place, but as this work allows time to speak about itself, it grants us in return the value of a long-lasting artistic statement.
The ancient Greeks thought that every object moves towards its own space and that this is what makes movement possible in the first place.
Beyond this, the question of the possibilities of time remains. In the absence of a life of its own that it could show us, time speaks through the voice of those who find and hear it. The works Tatjana
fur have been left with the scars of time. The ball is in our court.
Interview by Olaf Pfeiffer
What do you mean by time?
tatjana: For me, time is a multi-layered concept that determines our entire being, thoughts and actions. I am fascinated by the inevitability of its course and our inability to avoid this predetermined direction. I see time as a matrix, a universal structure within which I move as a human being. But for me, time is also an individual experience that is a construct of our subjective perception. For me, this is the most exciting area that I try to track down with my artistic work.
nina: For me, time is the thread on which I balance.
Why are you dealing with this topic?
nina: I feel there is stress in society, the pace is constantly increasing around me. This stress is gradually mutating into normality, leading us in the direction of a society that I don’t want. There is early education, tutoring, additional offers, refresher courses … Emptiness and slowness seem to have become dangerous concepts.
tatjana: I am interested in the subjective perception of time, the structuring, clocking mechanisms and the associated conscious and unconscious decision-making processes.
The processes with which we delimit time and make it comprehensible, the generation and adoption of evaluation standards that are linked to this set perception of time and their effects, being determined by others and being self-determined, chaos and order, overabundance and emptiness.
How did you conceptualize this exhibition together? What did you produce together?
tatjana: Lisa Glauer established the contact between us. She knew our previous works in which we had both dealt with dust, each in a different way.
nina: It was important to us not only to show older works, but also something that could grow, something that connects us.
tatjana: We started by discussing our personal ideas about time. From this process, even from this work of writing, we realized how essentially a product is interwoven with the production of time and the idea of the knitting project was born.
nina:… a job that ends up being more about other people’s work than ours! We asked people to knit something for us, something non-useful, useful or functional.
tatjana:… but to use knitting only as a measuring instrument for time production, so to speak. This had caused some complaints. An interesting phenomenon that quickly showed that all production is desirably in harmony with the “production of meaning”.
nina: It was very exciting to discuss with the people, to explain why it was important to us that they help us, that they do something “meaningless” for us. The aspect of wasting time was often discussed, including what is perceived as “right” and why you do anything at all. We were not interested in the aspect of handicraft as something typically feminine. We were interested in the time aspect, the use of time. How do we use our time, what do we do with it?
It was also interesting to talk to our “fellow knitters” about what they did and how they felt about producing something “pointless”.
tatjana: When designing the exhibition in the space, we worked together to develop a color concept that connects the space, and new audio works were created to open up another level of perception.
How did you come to the conclusion that it was important to put a joint work in the space instead of an exhibition in which each finds its own separate place?
nina: As we are interested in the same topic, it was only natural that we should create a work together. It was not only important that it was a joint work, it was just as important for us to involve many people, to get beyond the “artist myth of working alone in the studio” and to come into contact with non-artists.
tatjana: One level of working together offers an infinite number of new insights into the other person’s work and your own. Questions arise, critical points become clear, but synergies are also created. The desire arose to create a dialog between our various works and the visitors. To create spaces, to insert oneself into them at various points, i.e. to break open the idea of a “work of art” to be viewed from the outside and to help shape it oneself.
Vlad Morariu’s text uses Michael Ende’s “Momo” and the thought-provoking impulses on time presented in it as a starting and ending point. Was the book important for both of you?
nina: That’s funny! I didn’t consciously have the book in mind when we were working on the exhibition, but it was actually one of my favorite books as a child, and one of the few that I still own today and read again and again. The older I get, the more important I find the book. Realizing that you can’t save and save time is so smart. If I try to do everything faster, it doesn’t help in the end, I don’t have any more time left. I don’t want to let others think they know what should be important to me, what I should do with my time. Nobody gives me time for myself, I have to keep it free and use it for myself.
tatjana: Yes, of course this book was one that could not be missing from the list of literature on the path of exploring one’s own existence. I like the metaphors, which are still valid and can be transposed and reinterpreted in a contemporary interpretation of time.
What other impetus did your discussion have?
nina: I already started to deal with questions of time during my studies in Oslo. The dust work has its roots there, I spent a semester making and collecting dust in my studio, but I didn’t know how to develop it into a work of art. I only found the solution two years later, when I was already living in Weimar. In my diploma thesis (1999) I dealt with time and expectations for the first time. My diploma thesis (the video “Locken” and the series of drawings “Schatten vom Staub”) was a protest against expectations of me and my art, a reaction
against the fast pace of life, and what was considered important. In the drawings, I put dust on an overhead projector and traced the shadows for weeks. A drawing took up to 6 weeks to complete. The video lasts over 20 minutes in a single take, without editing. I sit in front of a window and make curls out of gift ribbons that slowly cover my body. A time-consuming task, with references to fairy tales and feminism, women’s roles and beauty ideals.
To what extent is the use of time a cultural or cross-cultural phenomenon for you, and to what extent does your exhibition discuss cultural origins, for example?
nina: For me, time is a cross-cultural phenomenon, but how we deal with it in the end is also very much shaped by our environment. By environment, I don’t just mean the country we live in, but also the people we surround ourselves with, the people we measure ourselves against. That is sometimes very difficult for me as an artist. As an artist today, you take on the role of an outsider in a society that measures its values in terms of careers, progress and collecting money.
tatjana: The way we deal with time is essentially culturally connoted. Problems in Western society resulting from the way we deal with time are not congruent with those of other cultures and forms of society. Of course, this is also reflected in our artistic work. The preoccupation with time production within a capitalist society, for example, visibility, value hierarchies, determination processes.
I focused more on the subjective perception of time, in other words, on what is, if you like, overcultural. I see this as a quality, a capacity for self-determination, but this must first be rediscovered and brought to mind so that everyone can use it consciously and profitably.
All your projects, which are otherwise quite different, work in a strikingly uniform way with or on white. What does the color white mean to you?
nina: The color white doesn’t mean much to me, it’s more about visibility/invisibility. In a way, white is nothing. With white you get close to the neutral, you can start from there. I’ve always tended to do black and white or colorless work. I find the boundary between perceptible and no longer perceptible fascinating.
tatjana: I usually work a lot with gray, as a non-color, so to speak, as a setting and carrier. In the installation “perpetual shifting” I use the found white as a blank space, which can be transferred as a variable and a possibility of occupation, but is not a de mar cation of time.
Tatjana, where did you get the idea to paint a white wall white again, seemingly for no reason?
tatjana: This ties in with my interest in exploring visibility and the invisible, latency and potentiality, the relationship between the partial and the whole. Time as such is not visible, not perceptible. A double application of paint, what does that mean?
For me it is a process of condensation, doubling, a partial penetration and overlapping, a coexistence of several layers. Only a few areas of the wall have been painted, so a selection has been made, a selection process has taken place. The areas are integrated into the overall context. If you look closely, you can see that the white
color is not exactly the same, it is hardly noticeable, it has a different surface quality, light refracts on it in a different way.
Tatjana, what were the considerations behind the wooden installation that structures the “tangible” part of your contribution?
tatjana: I see time perception as a construct, as a more or less stable connection. Wood is a building material as available – de time. I put some parts together and new levels and spaces emerge in the room. Others remain loose – as unused individual parts, as material. I chose a white coating for the wood, which is smooth and blends in visually with the room. The cut edges remain visible, a sign of their disconnection from a larger whole.
The pattern of the adhesive strips creates a kind of geometric (i.e. higher?), complex order in space ? Is this a kind of reflex, like scribbling in the phone book, or does it stand for a way of dealing with (too much or too little) time?
tatjana: Yes, I have to admit that I’m a fan of order in the sense of providing structure, which also has a lot to do with orientation. You are asking about hierarchies, about gradations, about an obvious state of the absolute and therefore self-contained. Time is relative. For me, creating order is a process of awareness and decision.
The adhesive strips are flexible, they are guide lines, they provide an order that I initially created, but you can also peel them off, which some of the visitors did. Then a shift occurs, something new.
Nina, when I consider the exhibition title “On the FLOOR of time”, I notice that your works explicitly avoid, if not minimize, contact with the ground (except for the bedding, which of course looks uncomfortable and alienating) – does falling out of time always mean losing touch with reality? Is time better spent squatting? Or, to put it another way – would you say that for you, the perception of time is a matter of the body?
nina: In “Dust to Dust” it really is the case that there is a separation from the ground. I wanted to achieve an intermediate state, just as time is neither grounded nor free-flying for me. The woman in the video hovers between heaven and earth, belonging to neither realm, so to speak. But what she does is very down to earth.
Dust is clearly part of life on earth. When you think of the afterlife, you don’t think of dust. And yet her “pointless” activity means that she is not participating in normal life, she is creating a free space to think, gaining time. It is active through its passivity. Here, time has very much become an experience of the body.
I think the connection between body and making is very important. You can talk and think a lot, but when you actually do something, physically perform it, you gain knowledge that you would otherwise never have. I wouldn’t have known anything about dusting if I hadn’t really been dusting for a long time, just thinking about it would have made it a completely different thing.
And yes, time is probably better spent squatting. We become more aware of ourselves when we squat, feel the body, its tiredness, its twinges and its little cramps. When squatting, there is not so much that can be pushed between ourselves and the experience; we are more open, more vulnerable and perceive things more directly without always having to interpose our intellect.
Nina, in some places your work gives the impression of apparent lightness or simplicity – is this necessary for the subject or does it characterize your working method? Is (having) time easy or difficult?
nina: This apparent lightness is certainly part of my way of working. I often shoot my videos several times to get to the state where the lightness becomes visible. I discover in the raw material what really interests me about a topic. I only find out by doing, thinking about it is not enough, I understand by experiencing it. When I look through my own material, I notice little things. I then try to develop these further and make them more visible, removing everything that is not essential. It works like a reduction, I sift out and then capture what interests me. I want this one thing to be “pure”. If the result comes across as “light”, I’m happy. The work to get there is part of my artistic process.
I strive to show a viewer this “lightness”. Having time is easy, filling time is very difficult.
Tatjana, in contrast to Nina’s, your wooden installation works very strongly and almost strenuously (at least as far as the production is concerned) with the existing space, its limitations, dimensions and three-dimensionality. What does the “high up” in the room mean to you?
tatjana: An essential approach of my work is to make found space an essential part of my installations, to make dimensions visible, to shift them, to reposition them. The work doesn’t work without space, it reflects my concept of time, but at the same time the viewer is thrown onto himself, he can discover, see over, he has to move, find his own position. So it was obvious to explore and structure the space, walls,
Including the floor, windows and permeability, exploring boundaries, inserting new modules, expanding the space, placing subtle links to more remote places in the room. “High up” is not a symbol of hierarchical order, it is another possibility for movement.