A Government of Times

 Featuring artists:
 APT artist Sven Johne, Black Quantum Futurism (Rasheedah Phillips, Camae Defstar), Mark Tribe, Daniel Eisenberg, Irina Botea, Jean-Stéphane Bron, Roee Rosen, Milo Rau, Collectif Essai & Armin Linke, Lia Perjovschi and featuring texts and documents by Walter Benjamin, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Benjamin Noys, Camille de Toledo, Paul B. Preciado, Cristina Freire, Gloria Anzaldua, Fredric Jameson, Paolo Virno, Johannes Fabian, Reinhart Koselleck, François Hartog, Gilles Deleuze, Steven Shaviro, Hartmut Rosa, Kodwo Eshun, Mark Dery, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Raqs Media Collective, Zendka Badovinac, Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Freeman, Robin Morgan, Yvan Schulz, Khan Yasir, among many others.

« Born from a modernity at the end of its rope, a « presentist » regime of historicity has emerged since the late 1980s. An exhibition will be imagining alternative regime of historicity for the future.

No one doubts that an order of time exists — or rather, that orders of time exist which vary with time and place. Historian François Hartog explored crucial moments of change in society’s « regimes of historicity » (a synonym for temporal order) or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. According to Hartog, contemporary Western societies have entered from 1989 into a presentist regime of historicity defines as a temporal order of static historicity, characterised by the end of expected horizons and as an invasion of the present into the realms of the past and future. How can we set time back in motion, to liberate us from the presentism to which we seem compelled, in Europe particularly ? What is the next regime of historicity to come ? What is the relationship between past, present and future we need to invent and deploy for the future?

Exploring chronopolitics, ​the exhibition that will take place in the Archive House / Méthode Room will propose a lexicon of disruptive temporalities, a semantic of times as a toolbox for the regime of historicity to come, specially thought for the context of Chicago and will display as well artists’ films and documents. Summoning concepts from recent historiographical renewal, the exhibition focuses on alternative temporalities put forward by artists, overlapping temporalities – a spectrality of memory and speculation – to rethink the staging of times. These « polychronic devices » are together imagining a multi-temporal and non-presentist contemporaneity and finally, tend toward a new politics of time, a possibility to govern the times differently : to imagine a « differential government of times », as it has been advocated by the philosopher Daniel Innerarity in his book, The future and Its Enemies (Stanford University Press, 2012). » (A.I.&K.Q.)