The exhibition ‘Time. From Dürer to Bonvicini’ (Die Zeit. Von Dürer bis Bonvicini) explores the intellectual history of time, its measurement, and time as subjective experience.
The artistic positions represented range from the Renaissance to the present day. Their aesthetic preoccupations are informed by biology, sociology, philosophy, politics and economics. Time is one of the great mysteries in the history of humankind, and is defined in multiple ways in fields as diverse as philosophy, biology, economics, politics and art.
This journey through the history of time features paintings, films, installations, performances and historical watches. They attest to the ephemeral nature of life, the scope for meditation opened up by painting, the changing seasons, and financial markets that are now synchronized down to the last picosecond.
Languages tend to be full of terms containing the word ‘time’. The exhibition, however, does not set out to answer the question ‘what is time?’ Instead, it offers multiple thought-provoking ideas that encourage visitors to relate the various facets of ‘time’ to each other.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Musée international d’horlogerie (MIH), La Chaux-de-Fonds. Over a hundred artists are represented with some 230 works