Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon: On Kawara and the Grande Complication

aufgeklappte Taschenuhr mit acht Ziffernblättern

On Kawara and the Grande Complication

Dialogue with the Schenkung Sammlung Hoffmann

The sound piece “One Million Years (Past and Future 2–6)” is characteristic of the work of the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara (1933– 2014). In works that often unfolded over decades, he repeatedly turned to time and space as the coordinates of human existence.

Exhibition Site Zwinger

DATES 18/08/2020—31/10/2021

The work that is presented in the Mathematisch- Physikalischer Salon is equally an artistic attempt to give a graspable form to the abstract notion of time. In the Bogengalerie, visitors hear the years of the distant past and future spoken out loud when they come to the end of the section “The Course of Time”. The recording is part of an ongoing series of readings that have taken place worldwide since 1993, for instance at documenta 12 in 2007 and most recently during the Venice Biennale in 2017. They are based on the books “One Million Years (Past and Future)” —completed in 1969 and 1980 — which list the year dates, written out, from 998,031 BC to 1969 and from 1996 to 1,001,995 AD. To read them in their entirety would take approximately 100 years.

**On Kawara, One Million Years: Past, 1970–71**

The work, which enters into a dialogue with the instruments of time measurement that are presented in the Bogengalerie, prompts reflection on the inexorable—yet barely graspable—march of time. The impossibility of an objective perception of time comes to the fore as the multi-digit year dates that are uttered in the space become meditative ambient noise—all while transcending the limits of cognitionin their sheer magnitude. Creating a point of intersection with the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon are two pocket watches known as Grande Complication watches, which feature a perpetual calendar. They, too, help organize time systematically and still can not control it.

A goal for the donated works of the Sammlung Hoffmann is to have them enter a dialogue with objects from the various museums of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, thereby opening up different perspectives and levels of meaning for both the contemporary and the historical exhibits.

To the Schenkung Sammlung Hoffmann

Further Exhibitions

11/03/2020 —30/11/2020