Linear Time Syllabus
PROJECT INFORMATION
DESCRIPTION
From 2020 to 2023, alongside each of our major programs, Level Ground worked with artists to curate a themed media syllabus of podcasts, articles, films, books, etc. This syllabus, from 2022 resident artist Bianca Nozaki-Nasser explores time.
CURATOR’S NOTE:
Linear time is a Western condition. Or as scholar Rahsaan Mahadeo says: “White time is synchronized to white life and asynchronized to nonwhite life.” Linear time relies on succession and progress in order to become directional. Time seen in neat chronologies and orderly arrangements is meant to provide some sort of understanding. But understanding for whom?
We all already know that time is not a universal phenomenon. You’ve heard about it, probably even lived it. Arab Time can mean arriving an hour or three late to a party is actually arriving on time. CP Time. Pakistani Standard Time. Whatever you call it. Any deviation beyond the dominant clock or calendar is typically named with the intent to shame. But instead of deviant, I see some experiences of time as a form of resistance to rival the violence of white time.
Maps have a long history of narrating power. They typically present some set of geographic information, or maybe political boundaries, often coming from sets of geopolitical, social, religious, and or economic values.
In making and researching, I’m working to wreck ideas of time and reckon with it’s multiplicity. Time can direct how we interpret and understand our own place in the world. Embracing, documenting, and physicalizing our own experiences of time is an opportunity to redefine what we consider to be normative time. The process of mapping cartographies of memory and time is just as important as the outcome. The agency of mapping is where mental meets material. Focus lies on the mapping activity as much as the map as an artifact. Many of us occupy bodies that break dominant interpretations of time. Our realities literally and figuratively can not fit within categories of seconds, minutes, hours, etc. Time is relational. In short, I’ve been thinking that time is messy, and that's a good thing.
—Bianca Nozaki-Nasser