A sect of Middle Ages Christianity believed that God reinvented the world in every moment. In this creationist myth, every increment of time generates the world anew, like a sporing petri dish perpetually wiped clean. A cosmogony of constant reset has always stuck with me as a fitting description of the present era’s recollective capacity. With colonialism’s forced amnesia and capitalism’s cult of innovation, time not only feels always restarting but parceled into alienated cells of experience. Capital, as the poet Dionne Brand writes, “steals time by organizing time.” As the British empire designed and popularized wristwatches to control its military, the right to one’s time—which is to say, the right to one’s life—is plundered by the Western hegemonic violence of slavery, incarceration, wage theft, debt, and other forces of extraction.

This exhibition was initially formed through the artists, whose works I learned alongside over these past years in Chicago. Holding their multifarious practices in my mind, I realized that what linked them was a defiance to this condition of constant reset. what flies but never lands? showcases these works that, through their own logics and affects, resist the slipstreams of the present. Staged in Chicago Cultural Center’s Michigan Avenue Galleries, the exhibition is gently organized into three concepts, one for each room: swirl, light, and ground. Both nouns and verbs, these terms offer frameworks for considering how the artworks relate to each other, and how they respond to the broader thematics.

Swirl proposes an imaging of history as embodied by the spiral. Unlike the Western teleological conception of time where the present exists on a linear plot between past and future, the spiral is coiled, repetitive, and dual-directional. Ana García Jácome’s installation of a speculative exhibition called We Protest Against Polio merges the already-happened with the not-yet. Re-presenting materials she found on polio from the 1950s to 1980s in Mexico’s Historical Archive of the Secretariat of Health, Jácome provides a glimpse into a process of historization that is at once specious, random, and ridden with values of the ruling class. (Some of these documents were later debunked as falsified yet remain in the archives.) Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel’s Too Close in Time for the Comfort of Mythmaking likewise enacts a concentric compression of time. Though its flashy arrangement may strike the viewer as an associative spell, this photographic collage is laser-like in its focus: the exotic birds of South America and the American businessmen who used their enthusiasm for birds as a pretext to insert themselves in the region’s economic and cultural development. Photographs from a National Geographic spread by Charles Munn III, a biologist who developed a macaw breeding ecotourist enterprise on the land of Tambopata Indigenous people, are placed next to photographs the artist took in natural history museums, of taxidermied birds and Amazonian Indigenous belongings with plumage. These images, as contributing writer Ionit Behar states in her essay “Time: An Indocile Matter,” are combined “in a maximalist manner to reanimate and denaturalize them, allowing the viewer to see them anew and to viscerally sense their polarities.”

Imani Elizabeth Jackson and S*an D. Henry-Smith’s aural-literary installation What the roots shallowed compare two different markers of time: trees and folk songs. Playing through wood-paneled speakers, Mose “Clear Rock” Platt’s 1939 recording of the song “Black Betty” is interwoven with the lines of a poem on river birches, the Latin name of which translates to black birch. The artists thread a rich association between trees and the anthemic song; the lyrics’ references of drinking river water fill the space as viewers sit under a photographic print of a solitary willow. Given its folk status as a chain gang song sung and passed along by prisoners while laboring, no single origin of the song can be pinpointed. Jackson and Henry-Smith propose a practice of remembrance, rooted in experimental Black ecopoetics, that is simultaneously born out of and divests from a violent colonial project.

Light evokes the relationship between time and technology, namely the promise of technology as a font of modern progress and mastery over nature. The architectural installation in Hương Ngô’s In the Shadow of the Future refers to the star-shaped terraced complexes of Ivry-sur-Seine, communal housing structures in one of Paris’s banlieues rouges (red suburbs) where Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Vietnam War relocated. Within its frame, three monitors display a video of a cosmonaut loitering in the neighborhood; this character is based on the pilot Phạm Tuân who became the first Asian space traveler in 1980 when he went into orbit as part of the Soviet Intercosmos program. In his essay “Sonic Infidelities,” published on the exhibition website [whatflies.link], Justin Phan writes that, “through her remediation of the space and time of the Cold War, Ngô creates conceptual slippages between how we might think about the refugee, migrant, and cosmonaut. In noting their travel, it brings attention to ourselves too as space and time travelers.” The techno-utopian spirit that Ngô’s piece references evocatively contrasts Max Guy’s video Problem Machine (What’s it like to be dead? What’s it like to die?), a minimal yet disquieting depiction of a nude body enclosed in and flushed by the blue light of a tanning bed. As contributing writer Ana Tuazon puts it in her essay “I Turn My Body Toward the Sun,” “in a way, Guy’s concept is like a joke: a Black man walks into a tanning salon. Problem Machine forces the awareness that, compared to the typically white users of tanning beds, the artist’s proximity to death may fall farther out of his agency before he enters the machine at all.”

Ground considers earthly materials as tools for record-keeping, and the mutability of these materials’ associations throughout history. Responding to the blue chemicals police used to mark demonstrators in the 2019 Hong Kong protests (referred to as “Water Cannon Blue”), Cathy Hsiao’s installation Mother’s House 孃家 | Architecture for Water Cannon Blue 水砲藍 presents “indigo-objects” that reclaim the cultural and spiritual significance of blue dye. Hsiao counters the mass-produced dye that visualizes crowd control technology with the ancient, ceremonious act of making indigo (which similarly pigments the skin upon contact). If the police hose spouting dye is a form of oppressive drawing, Hsiao asks us how mark-making can be redeemed as a joyful, anti-authoritarian practice. Likewise invested in drawing as a historical endeavor, SaraNoa Mark exhibits Unknown Hours, wall pieces of etched clay slabs, and Carved Conversations, floor pieces of engraved asphalt chunks. The tender assiduousness with which Mark inscribes the materials, one scratch at a time, starkly contrasts their status as infrastructural waste: lumps of asphalt, primarily used for road construction, that have washed back up on the lakeshore, eroded into rounded stones by the tide. The carved clay sculptures recall multiple timescales: the culmination of labor hours in the artist’s hands, the thousands of years’ endurance of architectural ruins, and even the geologic time of clay itself, which may survive beyond the scope of human memory.

The art historian Pamela Lee observed that out of the 1960s postwar Information Age had emerged a chronophobic art that had an “almost obsessional uneasiness with time and its measure.” The antithesis of this fixation, Lee suggested, was chronophilic art that was eroticly absorbed with time, “a perverse fascination with its unfolding.” Though the works in this exhibition register an insistent struggle with time, they are not necessarily anxious, gratuitously romantic, or even invested in standard methods of horology. I believe what they inform us is that consciousness of temporality arises not from the ticking metric of a physical clock, but rather from a political, social timekeeping. Our experience of time is deeply informed by others, and it is with others that we stand any chance to overthrow its hegemonic orderings.