Introduction
What is time and how can it be represented and measured artistically? And how can the future be thought? FUTURA. Measuring Time at Hamburger Kunsthalle invites 30 international artists, including Ceal Floyer and Pierre Huyghe, to address fundamental questions about temporality, sustainability and visions. The exhibition architecture transforms the entire first floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart, freeing it from modular walls and partitions. In this open design, artworks and artifacts are presented together in surprising dialogues that span across different historical periods and disciplines.
Ceal Floyer's Newton's Cradle, 2017, consists of an actual Newton’s cradle, a scientific demonstration device named after English 17th century scientist Isaac Newton. Using a series of swinging spheres, it is used to show conservation of momentum and energy in solid bodies. The device threads have been entangled, depriving the object of its initial purpose, but also creating a somewhat startling moment into the spectator’s experience of a space.
Pierre Huyghe's Cerro Indio Muerto, 2016, was taken on the surface of the Atacama desert in northern Chile, in a region called Indio Muerto (Dead Indian), the driest, lifeless place on earth and a testing site for exoplanet life detection and habitability, a human skeleton, unburied, undated, has been found and photographed by the artist in the exact position of his death, its bones and flesh merging over time with the ground.