Untimely Now | Franziska & Sophia Hoffmann

Installation in

ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Kulturlabor Berlin
Christinenstraße 18-19, Haus 8 / Pefferberg Area
10119 Berlin

Exhibition in ICI Library Research Project »Errans, in Time« and
ICI Library Event »Only Time Will Tell«
5 Dec 2017, 19:30

Exhibition 5 Dec 2017 – 11 Jan 2018
Opening 5 Dec 2017, 19:30
Finissage 11 Jan 2018, 18:00

Opening Hours:
Tue: 11:00 – 19:00
Wed and Thu: 11:00 – 16:00
Friday: by appointment

Time is told by clocks and narrators, yet not in equal measure. Narration can slow time down or speed it up, it can take big chunks of time to narrate a minute or narrate a whole day in a split second. Among narrative tenses, the past takes pride of place. But how is the future told in which things are about to happen? What time, what temporal consistency or fragmentation, what counterfactual fraying emerges if narratives employ future tenses? Is there something inherently erratic in narrating futures? Is the use of future tense able to make us pause and distance ourselves from what is being told, or does it dissolve into an ever more porous actuality?

The ICI Library Event Only Time Will Tell will explore the eccentric aspects of the future tense in the context of the ICI’s current research focus Errans, in Time. It will consist of a staged reading delving into the manifold ways of literary futures and, in its second half, the opening of the exhibition Untimely Now, an art installation of former train station clocks by Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann.
The art installation will be on display from 5 December 2017 to 11 January 2018 in the ICI Library.

Organized / Text by Dr. Claudia Peppel

Programme 5 Dec 2017, 19:30

Welcome: Corinna Haas
Introduction to the Exhibition: Dr. Claudia Peppel

Part 1
Staged Reading: Only Time will Tell
ICI Fellows will read excerpts from Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Maurice Blanchot, Christine Brooke-Rose, Thomas Mann, and others

Part 2
Opening of the Exhibition: Untimely Now from Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann.

Untimely Now, 2017
Installation with 12 programmed clocks

The exhibition addresses the way in which clocks are supposed to tell and keep time, presenting twelve official clocks originally installed at the main railway station in Frankfurt am Main. Detached from their point of origin and their usual purpose, these luminous, cube-shaped objects are temporarily integrated into the ICI Library, a space of books and media. The pulses of the clocks’ hands are quietly audible in the course of their rhythmic movements.

The total number of dials (two per clock) corresponds to the 24 hours of a day – but instead of keeping time, they display entirely unfamiliar flows of time. Each clock is programmed individually, and hence they are not synchronized with one another. The ensemble of clocks thus no longer measures real time and they are stripped of their usual function of guiding passengers through timetables and journeys. Instead, they offer new variations of time and destabilize the viewer’s perception.

Text by Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann, Dr. Claudia Peppel