Le Temps Sensible - Video des Monats
1 October 2008 - 31 October 2008
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT
Proust consequently uses cinematographic terms: time lets the glow of their laterna magica slide over (the body) and the settings coexist in the depth of the image."
(Gilles Deleuze, The Time Picture. Cinema 2)
Le temps sensible embarks on a search for traces of Marcel Proust's philosophy of time in video art. Although some of the works have no direct connection to Proust's central ouevre In Search of the Lost Time, they nevertheless illustrate aspects of the content and style figures that reveal clear echoes of Marcel Proust. The dialogue between contemporary art and historical novel creates a field of tension that not only testifies to the continuity of the great work, but also represents a cross-genre thinking between literature and film as fruitful. In his memorial work Marcel Proust develops a philosophy of time in which the loss of the past is ultimately overcome. Time does not die, as it is initially said, but remains an integral part of man. Body and mind are containers of time that “often support a frail and precious reality: the image”. Proust's big themes are time that destroys and memory that preserves. The inner experience of time, its disappearance and appearance, its subjectively perceivable shortening and extension and the search for the forgotten in our consciousness illustrates its elastic nature. Proust repeatedly tries to investigate laws that are perceived in the world, which unfold in a surreal appearance, and says: "As there is a geometry in space, there is also a psychology in time, [...]."