ART CITIES: Copenhagen-Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze employs a constellation of everyday materials in her work, ranging from found objects and photographs to handmade sculptures and living plants, creating encyclopedic and accumulative landscapes that penetrate walls and stretch across museums. Her work often takes on architectures, transforming space through radical shifts of scale or colonizing overlooked and peripheral spaces.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Copenhagen Contemporary Archive
Sarah Sze’s work challenges the static nature of sculpture as it models and navigates the ceaseless proliferation of information in contemporary life. Her most recent installation “Timekeeper” (2016) is on presentation at Copenhagen Contemporary. A keen interest in the concept of time is a recurring feature of Sze’s work. Though rather than describing time as chronological, and as something that can be objectively measured and recorded, she explores the kind of time that is associated with recollections and memories, ascribing a system of order that alludes to the unpredictable ways in which time is experienced and impressed upon our lives by images and events. The Installation creates a kaleidoscopic world of sound, images, objects and light that sends spectators on an unpredictable journey through the ways in which time is experienced and impressed upon our lives by images and events. In the centre of a darkened room is a dynamic sculptural assemblage of everyday items arranged according to a specific logic, that of a working desk, a site of the studio. Formed, in part, from remnants of the actual editing desk where the work was made, “Timekeeper” doubles as sculptural installation and as functional tool, a projector of itself. Screens flicker and fade, machines click and whirr, while projected images appear and reappear on the gallery walls and race, cyclically, around the room. This kaleidoscopic encounter echoes the deluge of information we process each day; images and events, at once familiar and strange, coalesce into a suggestion of time as both collapsed and expanded by memory and experience. Here, time does not feel linear, rather, it holds moments that can be revisited over and over again. In this sense, Timekeeper may bear little relationship to the mechanical devices with which we mark the actual passing of time, but instead proposes how information is pieced together as we recall and replay our lives.
Info: Copenhagen Contemporary, Trangravsvej 10–12, Copenhagen, Duration: 10/3-3/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, http://cphco.org
