M+ Museum has some thoughts on the nature of time

M+ Museum, a major art institution in Hong Kong dedicated to contemporary visual culture, is organizing a day of events centered around the artistic perception of time as part of Avant-Garde Now, a regular series instituted by the museum that engages with current trends in artists’ moving image practices. This year's edition, titled "Sensing Time," will revolve around the issue of time and its relation to the medium of moving images, while also inaugurating a year-long investigation of time as a venue for artistic expression and subject for contemplation. It will also serve as a prelude to the next edition of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, scheduled to open in May 2025.

The day's events will consist of screenings, lectures and artistic experiments by four artists – Raqs Media Collective, Takashi Makino, Tzuan Wu and Morgan Wong – who have been invited by M+ Museum to present their research into how time affects the perception of reality by the artist and the observer. The event starts off with Raqs Media Collective, who present two thought-provoking interventions. In Knots, attendees are invited to playfully engage with different modalities of temporal experience, disrupting the traditional perception of time as being ‘unidirectional’. It is followed in the afternoon by a black-boarding inscription act titled We Are Knotted, We Come Undone, which elicits an active debate about how we dwell in time.

In the program "Unfolding the unknown trace," Tzuan Wu brings together a selection of contemporary analogue experimental films by Taiwanese creators, who employ a variety of techniques to expose the more tactile aspects of moving images. This curated collection not only presents the ways in which filmmakers tailor their works, but also places a subtle emphasis on the ability of the cinematic medium to encode and decode an experience of time as fashioned into a cogent narrative. Morgan Wong follows with the lecture-performance Some Thoughts on Time Dilation, wherein he establishes a connection between scientific analyses of time and his own personal experiences of time as embodied in the five short films that accompany this lecture.

The final event of this one-day manifestation features Takashi Makino, who will screen a selection of five of his films followed by a performance by the artist. Takashi's practice displays a virtuosity with analogue and digital forms, wherein he manipulates sound and music and employs editing techniques such as foreground superimposition, layering, and multiple exposure to invoke a more personal and sensorial perception of temporal landscapes.

Sensing Time will open to the public on February 15, 2025 at House 1 of the Moving Image Centre at M+ Museum. Support for this event is provided by Chanel. More information about this and other events at M+ Museum can be found on their site.