Time Capsule, Kassel

Texts by Yves Aupetitallot, Andrea Viliani, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, and Akram Zaatari

Focused on the artistic project conceived by Akram Zaatari for dOCUMENTA (13), titled Time Capsule, Kassel, this book is published as a postscript to the artist’s exhibition “This Day at Ten / Aujourd’hui à 10 ans” at MAGASIN – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, on the occasion of the seminar subsequently organized by the artist and Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee in Naples as part of the program “MADRESCENZA – Seasonal Schools” (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale). Inspired by an act of conservation that the founder of the National Museum in Beirut undertook on the eve of the civil war in 1975–6, Time Capsule, Kassel is, in the artist’s words, a statement about speculation, photography, time and withdrawal—it’s a metaphor, more than it is an actual time capsule with a specific function and specific time to be opened. The fact “that the artist chose the form of a buried treasure, or a record of the present that is hidden away with the hope it will be dug up and unpacked and reconsidered for the future,” as Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes in her essay On Letters Lost and Found, “is crucial to the time horizon at work in Zaatari’s thinking. It also speaks to the desires, arguments and anxieties that run throughout his practice, particularly with regard to the various meanings ascribed to photography and preservation; to the different ways of seeing contemporary art in relation to the social, political and economic conditions that produce it; and to a more general concern about blindness, about mis-recognizing or mis-using the kinds of images that circulate in times of crisis and unrest.”