The present has been described by cultural theorist Boris Groys as a time of infinite delay; a performative, in-between space of repetitive actions that appear to lead no-where in particular. Time in the present therefore becomes lost-time, time spent enacting rituals of daily life that perpetuate our contemporary inability to commit to the longer-term. For Groys this notion of the present can be metaphorically situated in the contemporary video-loop, a device that allows us to enter and depart the narrative randomly at any point, checking in and out, as it were, without any sense of incongruity.
Using the idea of a looped encounter with time and epoch, this exhibition questions the possibility that today the present exists for us as a series of overlapping, individualised temporalities, marked by nothing so much as it’s own reflexivity. Each of the artists in Infinite delay (or spending time in the present) present works in which we encounter time, place and self as both an immediacy and a reverberation.