Time Proxies, an exhibition by Matthew Buckingham, held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, investigates the passing of time and the changes we witness in brilliant and innovative detail. The artist's main investigation lies in the art of memory and what time can make us forget or remember.The exhibition is divided into several rooms all of which hold different projects and artwork in a variety of media such as photography, sculpture and film.
In Celeritas (2009), one of the works in the exhibition, a phrase is silk-screened onto a chalk board enclosed in a wooden cupboard- these words are illuminated by light that has travelled a duration of_minutes &_seconds- The travel of time falling on the cabinet is calculated and then written in with chalk. This is intended to make us think about the speed of light as an imperceptible marker of time. This specific situation is repeated every hour and each time, the speed is calculated. The point of this is to make us feel close to the limit of temporal perception, perhaps reminded that time unfolds somewhere between seemingly instantaneous light-speed and imperceptibly slow geological time.
In another work, The Six Grandfathers, Papa Sapa, in the Year 502, 002 C.E (2002), Buckingham shows a photograph of Mount Rushmore National Memorial as it would appear in 500,000 years. This monumental sculpture, with portraits of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved out of the granite mountain, has become unrecognisable. As erosion erased the monument, its cultural, political, and social values faded away. Once again, we see the way in which time can erase things from our memory but also the way in which natural temporality has that same power.
Everything I Need (2007) was by far one of my favourite works, exploring the different processes of memory activated by psychologist Charlotte Wolff's return visit to Berlin, her native city, after 45 years abroad. A series of thoughts and memories is projected onto a screen and little by little we discover her story. A Jewish Lesbian worker in the early 40's, she was lucky to escape the concentration camps by going to Paris undercover. She mentions what life was like in the past and what life is like now, and we see how her vision of the present has been shaped by events in the past. It's all very interesting. She recounts her hardships, breakthroughs and deceptions with vigour and nostalgia, making us relive the pain of certain moments. It is as though Buckingham shows us that through storytelling, we can almost go back in time and switch from present to past in a matter of seconds, even if it is only our mind which guides us through the continuum.
Another thought-provoking part of the exhibition, once again related to time and memory, focused on symbols. It showed us some of the world's now most famous symbols and how they came to be. We notice swastikas, the Anarchy sign, the peace sign and the Squatter's symbol. Next to a photograph of the symbols taken in modern time on the street or at demonstrations, we have a detailed piece of information surrounding the symbol and how it came about. It's striking to see the way in which meanings can change and alter through time, and how things can go from being one thing to another radically different. A little like Chinese whispers. We see how the swastika was actually found by Heinrich Schliemman who discovered the symbol in the site of ancient Troy and associated it with the ancient migrations of Proto-Indo-Europeans. He connected it with similar shapes found on ancient pots in Germany, and theorized that the swastika was a "significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors", linking Germanic, Greek and Indo-Iranian cultures. The work of Schliemann soon became intertwined with the völkisch movements, for which the swastika was a symbol of the "Aryan race". Several years later, that sign was to become the Nazi symbol.
All in all, an exhibition that makes one contemplate about individual life and its minute presence on earth in comparison to the gigantic spectrum of existence. It makes us reflect on the passing of time, its effects on both objects and subjects, taking the human mind as its target of experiment. The viewer is challenged by this experiment in his own time-journey through the exhibition as much as the works of art themselves. The cultural, historical and psychological inclusions in the artwork make the exhibition all the more captivating in the rare themes it tackles. Buckingham offers an eye-opening insight into the complexities of human existence, which we cannot deny deserves to be continually re-assessed...
