Senses of Time: Video and Film-Based Works of Africa

“Senses of Time” invites viewers to consider tensions between personal and political time, ritual and technological time, bodily and mechanical time. Through pacing, sequencing, looping, layering, and mirroring, diverse perceptions of time are both embodied and expressed.

Yinka Shonibare’s European ballroom dancers in sumptuous African-print cloth gowns dramatize the absurdities of political violence as history repeats itself, while Sammy Baloji envisions choreographies of memory and forgetting in the haunted ruins of postcolonial deindustrialization. Berni Searle addresses genealogical time as ancestral family portraits are tossed by the winds and waves of generational loss, as well as the slippages and fragility of time and identity. Moataz Nasr’s work treads on personal identities distorted by the march of time, and Theo Eshetu draws us into a captivating kaleidoscopic space in which past, present, and future converge.