Introduction
Many of the works shown in The 500 Million Year Collaboration, Ryan Gander’s most comprehensive institutional exhibition to date, focus on notions of time and the perception of the self. The title the artist has chosen for his exhibition asserts an inconceivable temporal dimension. A collaboration over 500 million years? Between man and earth? Is it a look into the past or to the future?
What Gander calls “culturefield” is an imaginary, dreamlike parallel world, a kind of playing field on which exemplary visions can be put to the test and proposed. In the exhibition in Bern, many works revolve around the economy of attention which adapts to constantly changing technologies.
Gander doesn’t make it easy for the viewers who like to reduce artist and artworks to a specific artistic identity. His oeuvre defies being tied down to a single style and his works are often impossible to identify, because Gander pursues not one but a plurality of practices. As an artist, he looks for the particular form and visual language his inventiveness requires. Over the years, this has resulted in a highly complex system in which his works can be shifted into ever new relationships.