Vremie / I give you my time, 2020

Video, interactive digital platform

https://vremie.wixsite.com/igiveyoumytime

During the past few months, I have devised new ways of counting time – by following the familiar shadows crawling up and down my bedroom walls, or tracing how light hits a water body’s surface and disturbs it just so. No matter how each of us chooses to establish a personal connection with our surroundings, time has invariably flown in different ways than those we are used to. This platform acts as a clock of existence defined by impressions and reimagines the linearity of an archive as time collapses onto itself. Navigating through the different pages, each marked by a timestamp, one can choose to experience a 24-hour cycle or focus on one particular moment in time – the current one they are in or a past/future one. There is no additional context beyond the time when each video was taken, no day or place to make the experience particular to me as the person who took the videos. This level of ambiguity blends past, present, and future, and offers a mode of existing everywhere and nowhere. The abstract surroundings mostly lack human presence, and in the few instances when the observer is not alone, other beings appear unidentifiable and distant. 

With these snippets noticed and lived, I offer others to enter my perceived reality and in turn I enter theirs – with the hope of creating a multiplicity of being in a time of timelessness. Offering intimate moments captured when one is alone, the “archive” makes private situations public without exposing all – by giving the viewer a voyeuristic peek into someone else’s everyday without revealing anything about it except what one has chosen to notice. 

Such a suspension in non-reality reinforces the significance of instances of tranquil solitude and all that it can inspire; however, it also reminds the viewer that learning to exist in this post- world is also intrinsically tied with the importance of envisioning and realizing new collective futures of radical care. The next step of the project would be to invite others to share their perceived realities as reflections of themselves and enter a collective archive of anonymous shared existence. Browsing through unidentifiable media would take the viewer outside of the physical microcosm of their immediate surroundings and lift them into a new intangible realm; hopefully, it would also become a way to recontextualize our own narrative and take a step toward virtual collective self-transcendence.

Developed in:

Water Tower Art Residency #4 (link)

Organized and curated by Nia Pushkarova and NGO IME

Mentors: Bill Aichison (USA / China), Gary Hill (USA), Daisuke Takeya (Japan / Canada), Albena Mihaylova-Benji (Bulgaria / Switzerland), Prerana Reddy (USA), Qing Cai (China / USA)

Sept 2020, Sofia, Bulgaria (virtual)

Featured in:

Water Tower Art Residency #4, virtual group exhibition (link)

Sept 2021, virtual gallery space (link)