By Tuğçe Karataş

The 4th Istanbul Design Biennial’s Time School was in part born out of research from Z33 – House for contemporary art’s Studio Time research cluster. Delving into concepts such as hyper speed, deep time, expansion of time, the Time School explores strategies and models to create this time of attention, where you can discuss, reflect, or make together without the pressure of “productivity”. We talked to the Time School’s co-curator Ils Huygens, and discussed the potential of the project to question the conflicts and paradoxes of time, the credibility of the past and the reality of the present and translate into the possible futures.

Tuğçe Karataş: This year the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial has a research and process-orientated approach. How has the Time School emerged from this perspective?

Ils Huygens: The Time School is a collaborative project between IDB and Z33 – House for Contemporary Art, of which Jan Boelen is Artistic Director and where I am based as a curator. For Z33 the research and process-orientated approach is quite natural, since it is an essential part of how our institute works. At the present Z33 has defined three general topics, which we cluster under the name Research Studios, these are Studio Time, Studio Space and Studio Work. Within each cluster different subthemes are developed, for example the Time School is a subtopic of Studio Time, the larger research on time which more specifically, tends to explore contemporary paradoxes and conflicts of time. Other topics we’ve explored within Studio Time, are for example Nuclear Culture, which focused on nuclear time and deep time; or Studio Future which looked at future thinking in art and design throughout a number of projects and exhibitions. The Research Studios allow us to work in a more sustainable manner with artists, experts, partners and projects. So instead of always focusing on the next exhibition, we can work over a longer period of time on specific topics which can develop into different public outputs, this can be an exhibition, but it can also be a series of lectures, a publication; or an artistic research project that might later turn into a production.

TK: Can you briefly explain the curatorial approach for the Time School?

IH: The Time School is of course linking to the overall idea of A School of Schools. In this way, the Time School is a school for learning about time, or perhaps better said, it acts as a school for ‘un-learning time’. Un-learning time in the sense of clock time, standard time, linear time. The time that regulates our lives but that also slips away from us. The Time School asks takes its inspiration from philosophies of time that offer a more vitalistic view on time – Bergson, Deleuze, Benjamin, among others. They see time as an active and dynamic force, a force that can create breaks and ruptures in the linear flow of time, from where understanding and also transformation can arise.

On the other hand, the Time School also wants to examine the relations between school, learning and time. When we look back at the ancient Greek meaning of “skholè”, it is referred to as a non-productive time or “leisure time”, time of un-productivity. This notion is explicitly explored in the exhibition where the artists all explore different pedagogical and artistic strategies to create these unproductive moments, moments of deepened “attention”, driven by a shared curiosity rather than by a need to “produce” results.

Throughout the different projects we see experiments with creating new learning communities and groups that share time, and learn from each other. All projects experiment with different strategies of learning; by weaving, by reading, by walking, by travelling or even by sleeping together. And of course, not only the Time School works like this, all the other schools in the biennial offer similar experiments.

TK: As a part of the learning process, a sliver of the Time School premiered during the Milan Design Week, then titled School of Time. Specifically, the presentation showed two works that are also present in Istanbul.

IH: This first presentation of School of Time in Milan included the works of Commonplace Studio, Tim Knapen and Jesse Howard, and Teis De Greve. They developed two completely different yet quite corresponding installations that deal with questions of knowledge production and knowledge distribution today.

In Teis’s work there’s a set up of a couple of basic laserjet printers, and a number of copied pages that the visitor can insert in the printers. Using specifically developed algorithms, the installation then goes in search of online references to the texts, this can be images from Instagram, news items, social media posts. This way the written documents are constantly being de- and re-constructed. There is a constant adding of new layers of meaning, which however exist only there in that one specific moment.

The second installation developed by Commonplace Studio, Tim Knapen and Jesse Howard works quite differently. This group of designers took its inspiration from the Commonplace Notebook, a methodology developed by 17th century scientists to develop an indexed notebook, which can be used for your personal or for collective research purposes. The installation consists of 7 tables, each featuring a certain topic related to Time. Once the visitor activates one of the tables, a mechanical arm starts writing notes, quotes, thoughts and drawings in a notebook that you can take home with you. The installation is like an endless information machine of Time, sharing fragments and snippets of knowledge, generating curiosity and inspiration.

TK: Which challenges or issues you would like to tackle with Time School?

IH: I guess one of the main issues is what I discussed here above, to explore this notion of “attention”. It seems especially relevant today, in the “attention-grabbing economy” in which we live, where an ongoing flow of information (often redundant) is trying to catch your attention at all times and through all means. The attention-economy is not only overtaking the public sphere of the city but through the digital space of the internet, also pervades the intimate spaces of our homes, even up to our bedrooms.

TK: How will Time School continue after the biennial ends? What will be the legacy of it?

IH: As I mentioned earlier on, when talking about Z33 Research, the projects we develop with artists can move through different phases within a Research Studio, so for example, we have been collaborating already with Ecole Mondiale over several years, developing field trips, workshops and presentations that focus on their topic Inhabiting Time. As for Nelly Ben Hayoun and Helga Schmid, these are ongoing projects that will continue to grow, and which we will continue to help develop. The Time School itself will also continue after the biennial as part of Z33’s Studio Time, and we will present the artists and projects in a larger group exhibition in 2019. So basically, this means the Time School will continue to evolve and expand and we will continue writing, reading and walking together.