Curated by Belinda Quirke

The history of light unfolds the focusing of a moment that occurs when taking a photograph, to write a text with light about time. Consisting of a new series of painted photograms and a filmic installation ‘Time Tries All Things’, the works explore the correlation between our understanding of time and light to our perceptions of memory and history.

Time Tries All Things is an immersive two-screen video and sculptural installation that mediates between different conceptions of time; scientific, philosophical and cinematic. Commissioned by The Institute of Physics in London and developed from a collaboration with two theoretical physicists, Professor David Berman of Queen Mary University and Professor Fay Dowker of Imperial College, the installation positions two different concepts of time in a filmic encounter with two physicists’ viewpoints. Differing in their radical consideration of whether the future exists or not, they discuss a mutual struggle to represent their conceptions of time. Echoed through the different filmic approaches within each of the two films, the work centres on the unfolding of a moment, when a snapshot is taken of a 19th century stone plaque carved with the words ‘Time trieth troth’. Copied and carved throughout one film, in an exploration of the relationship between reconstruction and photography where both attempt to fix a moment; the installation expands into a consideration of the elasticity of the present instant within the flux of history.