ABOUT TIME: THE EXHIBITION

What makes photography a strange intervention, is that its primary raw materials are light and time. John Berger

time |tʌɪm|

noun

1 [ mass noun] the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole…

How does one capture the meaning of Time, beyond the definition in the dictionary?

Time… Date… Duration… Era… Hour, Minute, Second…

The concept carries different meanings depending on the context. Time can be an action that points to a precise moment, a split second of a minute of an hour of a day; or it can refer to a grammatical tense, signalling now, before, or the future. Time is also central to lens based media, inherently capturing the tension between the past and the present and serving to advance visual arguments about the particularities of a given reality… ‘willing a moment to last’

About Time: The Exhibition explores the complex and multifaceted relationship between images and time — historical, individual, and communal — through 8 artistic interventions that use time-based media. Inspired by Zanzibar’s rich history and cultural traditions, artists narrate real and imagined experiences through different economies of time. The artists’ works address different aspects and problematics of the Zanzibar Island and its people -- asking questions about individual memories and shared experiences and how these experiences, as time-bound dynamics, shape our sense of place and belonging. Can time-bound images both propagate and interrogate Zanzibar’s mystique? Can hidden truths be revealed by the moving pictures on a TV screen?

The selected artists for About Time: The Exhibition use photography, film, video, and performance to construct perspectives on time that are fragmented, disjunctive, or recursive in nature, offering alternative methods for engaging histories, experiences, and desires. Taking place alongside the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), the exhibition offers a unique introduction to “time-based media”, presenting a nuanced array of lens-based interventions that simultaneously upend and reframe conventional interpretations of the concept of time.

By exploring culture within specific frames of time, the artists demonstrate that rituals can be performed as acts of remembrance, romanticisation and even resistance. Private practices and public politics are intertwined as the artists scrutinize the contradictions and tensions between Zanzibar’s past and present, its hidden and visible, its relationship with colonialism, tourism and heritage, and more. In this context, ‘About Time’ is an exhibition about people’s relationship to their surroundings as mediated by memories and dreams. We hope to invite people to experience Stone Town’s unique heritage from new vantage points so that they will see walls and stones not as silent statues of a long-dead past but as the shifting skeleton of a living, breathing organism, filled with voices calling to be heard.

Featured artists for ‘About Time: The Exhibition' include; Amil Shivji (Tanzania, Mainland), Eric Mukalazi (Uganda), Various Hena Artists (Zanzibar), James Muriuki (Kenya), Nicholas Calvin (Tanzania, Mainland), Rehema Chachage (Tanzania, Mainland) and Shams Banji (Zanzibar). The exhibition will features guided heritage tours that visit each site specific intervention. The exhibition will be preceded by a masquerade designed and choreographed by Farouque Abdallah (Zanzibar). Interventions of responsive text placards hang around Stone Town to stimulate conversation and questions about the featured artwork and how it relates to broader conversations about the role of art in our society.

Produced by Zanzibar International Film Festival
Supported by ACRA and Nafasi Art Space
Additional Funding from CKU and the European Union
Curated by Rehema Chachage and Rebecca Corey
Photos by Nicholas Byrne
Stone Town, Zanzibar
July 2016