NO ARROW IN TIME

4.9.-26.9.2021

Wed-Fri 14-20, Sat-Sun 15-19

This exhibition is about a stormy day sitting on the local bus, eating a banana like a ghost, like a ghost riding through the suburban industrial area, its buildings and its trees, sharing the public space with others, relating with one’s surroundings and leaving one’s body behind.

No arrow in time is a group exhibition with ten Helsinki based visual artists that usually work with moving images, text and time based art. The show displays several video works as well as text and objects. We share an interest in the concept of the essay, and use it as an approach in our work. For the past six months we have been sharing our ideas and reading and writing together. We live in the same landscape but see different things, different topics. There's a unique language to each one's world.

From the viewpoint of most laws of physics, time is symmetrical. In equations and happenings of atomic level coming together and falling apart look alike – anything could be reversed and still make sense. But the way we experience time is based on the increase of entropy: I drop a coffee cup, the pieces scatter in all directions and lose the unity we used to perceive. If the coffee cup would reunite with its pieces, we’d experience time to move backwards. This is called the arrow of time. However, parallel to linearity and causality we experience time as layered, cyclical, warped and distorted. Associating between different time frames we find ourselves in states of stillness, in loops or existing in the past. The arrow of time splinters into so many directions it loses the alleged authority to our meanings.

Artists behind the exhibition are: Heta Bilaletdin, Rong-Ci Zhang, Natalie Eliassen, Liinu Grönlund, Elsa Heikkilä, Janne Laukkarinen, Essi Pellikka, Pedro Riva, Salla Tykkä and Salla Valle.