Je ne prendrai pas de calendrier cette année car j’ai été très mécontent de celui de l’année dernière — Alphonse Allais — Florence Loewy — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 12 → February 23, 2013

The history of measuring time goes back to the first civilisations, since a world without meter is a world which collapses.

The majority of calendars are defined in relation to the sun or moon in order to give ever more precision to a grid of successive and quantifiable instants: the year, month, day, hour, minute and second. This time finds form in the space of a sheet. It manifests in the grid, passes with the page of the diary that we blacken and disappears with the block calendar which we tear, day after day. But there is also the time which exists in our intimate conscience, open to multiple temporalities, heterogeneous and divergent. It lengthens, accelerates, becomes weighty or gets forgotten.

Many artists have questioned these temporal realities, taking forms such as almanacs, calendars and diaries. They model this time grid, deconstruct it, appropriate it, enlarge it, shorten it, cut it, update it and push their arbitrary creation to the absurd. They play on the relationship between the conventional representation of time in western calendars and imagery, typography, handwriting, repetition of motifs, systems, page setting or the associated meaning given by them.

These calendar themed propositions are characterised by dates, appointments, parabolas, titles, drawings, events, photographs and specific stories. They follow the course of time, determine their own time or travel in time, opening windows distinctly out of kilter with earth clocks, creating a strange spiral of appearance and disappearance.

To mark our entrance into the New Year, this exhibition sets out to perennialise the ephemeral and dated object, to return the hourglass, to leaf through the grid in reverse, to read and rediscover with a fresh eye those now timeless works, neither obsolete nor premonitory but works to indefinitely revisit.

I don’t believe that Tuesday is necessarily better than the Monday which precedes it, or than the Wednesday which will follow after that.

Jorge Luis Borges