Eventhttps://doi.org/10.25620/e161207-1
Exhibition
7 Dec 2016

The Waiting Room

Finissage, 11 January 2017, 18:00

A waiting room most commonly is an area of an office, a practice, or a parlour where people are seated while waiting for their appointment. Waiting rooms can project engagement and care, commercial or administrative interest, neglect, hope, or misery. Designed to provide distraction, comfort, or access to information, they often end up frustrating, infuriating the visitor, becoming a materialized manifestation of time stretched, whiled away, annihilated. The curious atmosphere of these interiors seems to soak up the time waited, spent, lost within them.

This group exhibition focuses on empty waiting rooms and the notion of waiting in the visual realm, displaying photographic works and video art.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Giulia Bruno
John Allan MacLean
Claudia Peppel

In English

First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/the-waiting-room/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the ICI Library Event

Waiting

Waiting at the border, the government office, the hospital. Waiting one’s turn, holding the line. Waiting for the end of the play, for a diagnosis, for sleep. Waiting for an answer, a visa, or a loved one. Waiting for something that will never come. Waiting is often conceived of as pointless void, idle or ‘stolen’ time, provoking shapeless boredom, or as ritualized demonstration of power, exercise of passivity – rarely, however, as deferral, productive break, an interstitial moment of contemplation and reflection. Nobody likes to wait, nobody likes to be kept waiting.

Yet waiting is also understood to provide the most immediate, emblematic, albeit infuriating experience of time. Is it possible to say, conversely, that, as long as there is time, experience is marked, at least in part, by the curious suspension of waiting?

‘Waiting’ will explore the enervating and exhilarating aspects of waiting in the context of the ICI’s current research focus ERRANS, in Time. In two parts, this year’s ICI Library Event will explore the socio-political implications of the ways in which we are being kept waiting and the paradoxical fullness and intensification of time spent waiting.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Julie Gaillard
Clio Nicastro
Hannah Proctor
Daniel Reeve
Ben Robinson
Arianna Sforzini

Organized by

Corinna Haas
Claudia Peppel
Arnd Wedemeyer

Part of the ICI Library Event

Containing also

Cite as: ‘The Waiting Room: Finissage, 11 January 2017, 18:00’, exhibition presented at the ici library event Waiting, ICI Berlin, 7 December 2016 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e161207-1>