”Ingrid Ene's solo show ”Windows of future past” reflects on time and memory, from subjective experiences, to collective nostalgias. After a year of live performances, audio recordings and open-calls as part of the ”Artists Play With Time project”, the artist continues the cross-media dialogue she initiated in visual form, through an installation of photography and video works presented at the Diptych art space in Bucharest. The show also marks the launch of the artistsplaywithtime.ro website, where viewers can explore all of the sound works recorded during the project.\n

Time, especially in such divergent worlds as they exist now - digitally personal, memory-linked to our present, impossibly future-aimed – is acoustically ascetic, stuck to its disyllabic symbolic rhythm. Multiplying the arrow of time in all of its layers, from the individual, to the historical, from the singular thread of nostalgia to a collective experience of our histories, we can imagine how the sound wave-length fluctuates in multiples, reverberating through time as a fluid force that we are connected to.\n

Likewise, Ingrid Ene, in her collectively-minded solo show, departs from a singular memory, that of her grandparent’s house. During her childhood, a wound-up spring clock would fill the silence during quiet nights as adults would care for the elderly, where three generations lived under the same roof and for whom a sound of a ticking clock drew different shapes of time.\n

The works presented in the exhibition invite us to reflect on how the past influences our reactions in the present and future. The images in the photographic and video installation works are part of the artist's personal archive, intuiting how nostalgia connects personal biographies with collective biographies, as theorized by Svetlana Boym in her book, ”The future of nostalgia”. Ingrid Ene renders this approach in a dialogue with the invited artists, through the visual association of photography with sound compositions created throughout the project.\n

The exhibition is otherwise set up as a scenography, a theater outside of the time-space continuum, where images, sounds, retro-screenings are linked with the main source of observation and the beating heart of the art space: the generating installation of clocks and sound-works. The time pieces connected through wired microphones seem to be making up the parts for a larger mechanical durational body – that can be tweaked, adjusted, played at, ideally warping our own sense of the now.\n

From this vantage point, a visual realm opens up, a journey through collectively recognizable outside and inside spaces that seem to be recollected from a vision of our past together. A staircase entrance, a lone neon sign, the details of a car snowed in memories we can no longer properly retrieve separately, but only together.” curatorial text by Cristina Stoenescu\n


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