The Multiple Nature of Time / Natura multiplă a timpului

The Multiple Nature of Time exhibition project is conceived as a meditation on the manifold possibilities of perceiving time: a transversal time of the physicality of surrounding existence, explored by Ciprian Ciuclea by appropriating the universality of mathematical language; a time of introspection, dedicated to temporal eternity and the perception of the dual nature of reality, explored by Roxana Savin in a series of works that question the fluidity of the relation between the seen and the unseen, light and darkness, reality and illusion; a time suspended between two worlds that transcends the materiality of perceptible knowledge and constitutes a reflection on the obsolete nature of the structures and institutions of scientific research with the end of the communist regime in Romania, as revealed in Matei Bejenaru’s works; but also, a time constituted between reality and fiction, a time of contemplative optimism described by Lucian Bran in the context of a glamorous imaginary universe that reveals to us the promise of escape to another world.

While Ciprian Ciuclea’s project Intervals of an infinite line (2023) inter-relates different mathematical structures with the surrounding realities, observing the manner in which the mathematical universe extends at the level of assemblages and the infinity of fractions that can be identified in the rhythm of nature’s repetitive structures, Roxana Savin’s series of pictures Dark Matter (2017) traces relations between the measurelessness, fluidity and mutability of the dark horizons of water and the sense of disorientation, the experience of the  void and the abyss as determining structures of the inner universe. In another temporal register, in his photographic archive Between two worlds (2009), Matei Bejenaru explores the world of scientific knowledge, documenting the current state of the museums, scientific laboratories and research institutions founded in the communist period. In turn, in his series of pictures Promised Land (2011), Lucian Bran reflects upon the aesthetics of the same period, capturing the discrepancies between the everyday reality and the fabulous imaginary world of the wallpaper used as a very popular interior design feature in the Romania of the 1980s.

The structure of the exhibition demarcates the discourse framework of each artist, setting organic inter-relations at the level of possible conceptual explorations that remain open to the questioning of the multiple nature of time. The multivalent issue of time, established as the conceptual framework of the exhibition project, opens up a plethora of analysis lenses of the photographic works exhibited. Reading the exhibition, without any pre-established visitors path, opens an broad creative process that invites new possible interpretive approaches. By exhibiting a series of photographic works in spaces designated to each artist, the exhibition project takes the form of a cluster of images that interconnect a series of micro-narratives steeped in their own time. In this sense, the exhibition reunites different narratives of the last twenty years, interfusing the poetic and the political dimensions in a processual approach to time, seen as an index of change, as an interstice of several possible worlds, but also as an effect of the material nature of the surrounding world or an event of perception oriented towards a moment of introspection.

(Cristina Moraru, ”The Multiple Nature of Time”, excerpt from the book, p. 15-22)