Ciné-chronotones: Decolonial Temporal Critique in Contemporary Moving Image Practice
Ciné-chronotones: Decolonial Temporal Critique in Contemporary Moving Image Practice is my essay contribution to the publication for Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, which I co-curated across Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room in New York from May 17-28, 2023. The culmination of a year of collective study at the Whitney Independent Study Program, the exhibition gathered an international array of art practices that identify, challenge, and propose alternatives to colonial capitalist modernity's objective, linear, and divisible conceptions of time. My essay contends with the determining logics and material conditions that make/made these modern temporal regimes thinkable, using the cinematic apparatus as an apt mediatic site of chronopolitical inquiry. Drawing on Massimiliano Tomba's notion of the “chronotone,” I look to a global selection of film-based art practices – by Kobby Adi, Sky Hopinka, Samson Kambalu, and Karrabing Film Collective – to consider the ways their varied structural incorporations of indigenous thought systems refuse and resist these hegemonic temporal orders.
A digital version of the essay can be accessed here.
Image: Sky Hopinka, In Dreams and Autumn, 2021 (detail).
Images courtesy of Hicham Gardaf.
