Eventhttps://doi.org/10.25620/e180105-1
Exhibition
5 – 11 Jan 2018

Untimely Now

By Franziska Hoffmann
Sophia Hoffmann
The exhibition addresses the way in which clocks are supposed to tell and keep time, presenting twelve official clocks originally installed at the main railway station in Frankfurt am Main. Detached from their point of origin and their usual purpose, these luminous, cube-shaped objects are temporarily integrated into the ICI Library, a space of books and media. The pulses of the clocks’ hands are quietly audible in the course of their rhythmic movements.

The total number of dials (two per clock) corresponds to the 24 hours of a day – but instead of keeping time, they display entirely unfamiliar flows of time. Each clock is programmed individually, and hence they are not synchronized with one another. The ensemble of clocks thus no longer measures real time and they are stripped of their usual function of guiding passengers through timetables and journeys. Instead, they offer new variations of time and destabilize the viewer’s perception.

Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann have been working together on mixed media installations as well as film and video projects since 2003. Questions regarding social processes, urban landscapes, and emerging technologies play an important role in their work. Found objects and technical devices are often revalued and transferred into new settings. 

Both sisters have studied at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden. Currently they are teaching in the New Media department at the Technische Universität Dresden and curating film and video screenings at Motorenhalle Dresden.

Selected exhibitions: Orangerie/Englischer Garten (Munich, 2017), Hellerau – Europäisches Zentrum der Künste (Dresden, 2017), GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Leipzig, 2016-17), RischArt – Central Station (Munich, 2015), Film-Funk-Fernseh-Zentrum (Düsseldorf, 2014), Art of Engineering Ferchau AG (Gummersbach, 2012), Kunstgewerbemuseum Schloss Pillnitz (Dresden, 2011), Grabado Contemporaneo (Santa Cruz, Tenerife, 2011), Diamantenbörse (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), Columbus Art Foundation, HALLE 14 (Leipzig, 2010), Bruch & Dallas (Cologne, 2009), ACC Galerie (Weimar, 2008), Department Store (Chicago, 2008), Playspace Gallery at CCA (San Francisco, 2007), Paço das Artes (São Paulo, 2007)


Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann

Organized by

Claudia Peppel

In English

First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/untimely-now/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the ICI Library Event

Only Time Will Tell

Time is told by clocks and narrators, yet not in equal measure. Narration can slow time down or speed it up, it can take big chunks of time to narrate a minute or narrate a whole day in a split second. Among narrative tenses, the past takes pride of place. But how is the future told in which things are about to happen? What time, what temporal consistency or fragmentation, what counterfactual fraying emerges if narratives employ future tenses? Is there something inherently erratic in narrating futures? Is the use of future tense able to make us pause and distance ourselves from what is being told, or does it dissolve into an ever more porous actuality?

The ICI Library Event Only Time Will Tell will explore the eccentric aspects of the future tense in the context of the ICI’s current research focus Errans, in Time. It will consist of a staged reading delving into the manifold ways of literary futures and, in its second half, the opening of the exhibition Untimely Now, an art installation of former train station clocks by Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann.Programme

Welcome: Corinna Haas
Introduction to the Exhibition: Claudia Peppel

Part 1
Staged Reading: Only Time will Tell

ICI Fellows will read excerpts from Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Maurice Blanchot, Christine Brooke-Rose, Thomas Mann, and others.

Part 2
Opening of the Exhibition: Untimely Now

The artists Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann will be present.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Cristina Baldacci
Elizabeth Brogden
Christiane Frey
Julie Gaillard
Francesco Giusti
Clio Nicastro
Hannah Proctor
Daniel Reeve
Birkan Taş
Tom Vandeputte

Organized by

Corinna Haas
Claudia Peppel
Arnd Wedemeyer

Part of the ICI Library Event

Containing also

Cite as: Franziska Hoffmann and Sophia Hoffmann, ‘Untimely Now’, exhibition presented at the ici library event Only Time Will Tell, ICI Berlin, 5–11 January 2018 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180105-1>