How to Travel in Time

curated by S.I. Rosenbaum

Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: Ebu, 2015 (detail)
The idea of traveling in time to alter or salvage the past is one of the few narrative motifs that appear in human cultures after the 1800s. Major narrative forms were invented, again and again, in many cultures and many times, but nowhere in human folklore, scripture, drama, or poetry does the idea of time travel arise until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

It seems odd, since almost all of us have the urge to change or resurrect the past. "When a child prays, 'Please, God, make it didn't happen,' he is inventing time travel in its essence," the science fiction author Larry Niven wrote. "The prime purpose of time travel is to change the past; and the prime danger is that the Traveler might change the past." The latter "danger" gives rise to the closely related genre of alternate history.

One of the ways we can come closest to bringing lost objects into the present, or creating an alternate history, is in works of art: objects and images drawn from an imagined past or alternative timeline and made actual, visible, tangible, in the present. This exhibition will feature artists who, in one way or another, attempt these acts of temporal recovery.

Not coincidentally many of these artists are members of diasporic, displaced, and/or Indigenous communities—communities for whom the apocalypse has already occurred, and for whom time travel has become imperative to survival.

And nothing can come to the present from the past unchanged.

  • artists:
    Morehshin Allahyari
    Lee Brogan
    Hector Ferreiro
    Nicholas Galanin
    Gideon Rubin
    Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind
S.I. Rosenbaum is a journalist and artist born in Boston and living in Queens.



Installation Images

Gideon Rubin, Black Book, 2017, and Héctor Ferreiro, Christic Panel, 2016. Installation view.

Gideon Rubin, Black Book, 2017 Installation view.

 

Gideon Rubin, Black Book, 2017. Installation view.

 

Gideon Rubin, Black Book, 2017. Installation view.

 

Installation view.

 

Lee Brogan, Guadalcanal, 2015, and Nicholas Galanin, I Think it Goes Like This, 2012. Installation view.

Nicholas Galanin, I Think it Goes Like This, 2012. Installation view.
 

Héctor Ferreiro, Christic Panel, 2017. Installation view.
 

Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: Ebu, 2015. Installation view.
 

Lee Brogan, Guadalcanal, 2015. Installation view.

 

Installation view.

 

Brochure Images

Morehshin Allayhari, Material Speculation: Ebu, 2015, 3D printed plastic and electronic components, 12 x 4.5 x 3.5 in

Lee Brogan, Guadalcanal, 2015, Cast glass, wooden box, padding, 15.7 x 12.2 x 14.5 in
 

Hector Ferreiro, Christic Panel, 2017, Found Objects and paint on ceramic, plastic, stone, and wood, 54.3 x 42.5 x 4.3 in

Nicholas Galanin, I Think it Goes Like This, 2012, Wood and paint, Dimensions variable
 

Gideon Rubin, Black Book, 2017, Gouache on book paper, 9.8 x 14.8 in
 

Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, 2015, Video, 29 min (still)

apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of Israel in New York, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.