Time

What does 'contemporary' actually mean? This is among the fundamental questions aboutthe nature and politics of time that philosophers, artists and more recently curators haveinvestigated over the past two decades. If clock time -- a linear measurement that can be unified,followed and owned -- is largely the invention of capitalist modernity and binds us to itsstrictures, how can we extricate ourselves and discover alternative possibilities of experiencingtime?

Recent art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as wastingand waiting, regression and repetition, deja vu and seriality, unrealized possibility and idleness,non-consummation and counter-productivity, the belated and the premature, the disjointed and theout-of-sync -- all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronologicalexperience. While such theorists as Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman have proposed"anachronistic" or "heterochronic" readings of history, artists have opened upthe field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question.This collection surveys contemporary art and theory that proposes a wealth of alternatives tooutdated linear models of time.

Artists surveyed include MarinaAbramovic, Francis Alys, Matthew Buckingham, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, BeaFremderman, Toril Johannessen, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Christian Marclay, nova Milne, TrevorPaglen, Katie Patterson, Raqs Media Collective, Dexter Sinister, Simon Starling, Hito Steyerl,Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tehching Hsieh, Time/Bank, Mark von Schlegell

Writersinclude Giorgio Agamben, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Walter Benjamin,Franco Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Huberman, Dogen Zenji, Peter Galison, Boris Groys,Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Joshua Foer, Elizabeth Grosz, Adrian Heathfield, Rachel Kent, BrunoLatour, George Kubler, Doreen Massey, Alexander Nagel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Daniel Rosenberg, MichelSerres, Michel Siffre, Nancy Spector, Nato Thompson, Christopher Wood, George Woodcock

Amelia Groom is a critic and curator who is completing a PhD in Art History and Theory at the University of Sydney. She is a regular contributor to frieze and other contemporary art publications.