Part of the group exhibition
YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at Gropius Bau Berlin,
The Clock Is Always Wrong is an extensive new body of work that communes with historical objects from Wellcome Collection, meeting their material complexity and immaterial intent with new works by Hedva that include kinetic sculptural objects, textile prints, found objects, drawings, text, and audio. Each object in the room is a kind of clock, made from materials that tell time: honey, ink, hair, water, mold. One Wellcome Collection object has traces of 15th-century vaginal fluid on it; one of Hedva's objects is a handblown hourglass filled with a black pigment specifically concocted to take the length of the exhibition to fall from the top to the bottom. Once it falls, the hourglass can never be used again.
The historical artifacts converge and mingle with Hedva's objects, often in the same vitrine, with the intention to collapse the distance between them in time and context. Hedva asks: “What is the anticapitalist approach to vitrines? Could a vitrine even exist without empire? Might a vitrine be a stage?”
The body of work confronts the assumptions in the title with the retort: “But—care, repair, and healing do not exist.” The work is
about time as much as it
tells time, but the time being told is cyclical, haunted, fated, refuting capitalist quantity. How do we—humans, animals, plants, minerals, stars—“tell” time?
Read an in-depth interview with Hedva about the work
here.
More information and photos available
here,
here, and
here.
