Igor Jesus: Time Machine
Holding on to the fourth dimension: Reflections on Igor Jesus’s Time Machine
Igor Jesus’s Time Machine, originally titled Papagaio (Parrot), opened on 28 March 2024 amidst unprecedented weather conditions in Lisbon. At or around the same time Igor was testing the sound of the mixed-media sculpture, the curators stamping away bite-size information pamphlets in the Ping Pong room of Antecâmara, and audience members getting ready to step out into what was assumed to be the end of winter rains, motorists had spotted a “potential tornado” crossing the Vasco da Gama Bridge. This immensity went unnoticed by most who were engulfed in the opening. The hours before, a sacred time for curators and artists alike, is a long-standing moment of rituals, nervous break-downs, revelations, and disagreements, all of which, some may argue, feed the effect of the showing. With unreliable sound chords, the risk of tripping over the projector, the invisibility of the bar, and limited space for audience movement, the curators were coming to realise, to our horror, that the experience during the opening was going to be different from what had been understood to be a moment of meditation, transcendence, and intimate relationality to the universe that Igor had devised.
Consistent with Igor’s practice, the exhibition was to highlight that creativity and artistic expression have the special power to make visible what is invisible. The work, in conversation with the physical space of the here and now of Galeria Antecâmara — Rádio e Galeria, would pulsate with dynamic sound and visual effects, offering a sensory journey extending beyond the boundaries of the gallery space. By drawing inspiration from previous experiences, Time Machine invited viewers to engage with their senses through a living sculpture, a space to meditate, and a space of liminality. The artist’s technical ability to translate visual stimuli into auditory experiences creates a synesthetic encounter, challenging conventional notions of artistic expression. Given his loyalty to research-based practice, the installation was to serve as a natural progression of a kind of exploration that pushes the boundaries of expression and audience engagement and at the same time creates new discursive and epistemic material in the field of perception.
And serve it did. Despite the severe weather conditions, or perhaps as a response to it, Time Machine set itself up in a darkened room behind the partially ajar doors of the venue. The intensity of the rain outside matched the intense, albeit coarser, hum of the installation inside. Instead of presenting itself in sharp contrast to the sounds of the urban landscape, the experience of Time Machine seemed to be in fervent harmony with the outside. And somehow, the curatorial statement—written before the curators or even the artist had themselves experienced the piece—had been made a reality:
… the work, housed within Galeria Antecâmara, is in conversation with the physical space of the here and now and infuses the hollowed spaces of the building’s architecture with an experience from elsewhere. It would be a laborious attempt to define the threshold between inside and outside—of where the skin of the artwork truly ends and the space begins. Instead, Time Machine performs as a transitory experience between human and more-than-human perceptions. (Weinholtz et al.)
A difference between adopting a role and being assigned one is how the tasks get approached. Being assigned, designated, and handed over the material forces one to approach the tasks from a distance. One is critical to the act of responsibility rather than creativity. In November 2023, we first heard of Igor as the artist with the same name as a footballer, “so add artist after his name to find him.” Even so, finding information about him was a scavenger hunt around the internet, with little to nothing being divulged about him or by him. We should have recognised this to be the premise for the kind of curatorship we were going to undertake. That our agency in the construction of the project would grow in proportion to our experience with it. That we were going to have to build a process of knowing what the artist already knew, understanding why it interested him, and documenting, through his understanding, why we felt his work needed attention. None of which was an easy task.
The practice of co-curating, a phenomenon that has garnered much attention since the success and controversies of ruangrupa’s process of Lumbung witnessed during documenta 15, has seen itself accumulate criticism as well as reformative application across various programs. From De Appel’s Curatorial call 2024, Sanderg’s Master’s programme, SPHERE’s operative model, and more, the practice is what Kevin Brazil calls “an experiment in ‘the art of administration.’” For all the romance that comes with the field of curatorship, administrative sustainability is the least sexy aspect of it. Hard to deny is the exhaustion it possesses in each programme's need and demand to organise, reorganise, and disorganise what has been. Furthermore is the ongoingness of the dialogue between artists and curators, artists as curators, curators as artists, philosophers as curators and so on, which presses for slower processes of construction seated in stark opposition to the timeline of the funders, sales, and outreach.
So, while Lumbung as a practice could retroactively fit into what was happening within this project, Jerzy Grotowski’s practice in physical theatre provides a better explanation as to how, on that rainy day, we opened the door for Time Machine. For Grotowski, the limitations offered by experiences within moments of urgency force the body-mind to find alterity in processes already established. Not only was this a way to transcend what already was, but for him, employing this strategy enabled his actors to delve into subconscious gestures, thoughts, and responses that escape the social, political, and dominant conditioning of how to be. Thrown into the practice of an artist, with whom most of us didn’t share a common language, the curatorial process, had already hit its first limitation.
His online impression, or lack thereof, could be symptomatic of the deconstructivist phenomenon of “death of the author” (Horvat 2012, 1). In a sense, the absence of his face led to the abundance of the experience, overtaking the opening which is usually overpowered by the artist-celebrity. His interpretations, his beliefs, and his ways of reading his work were shared in brief, sleight-of-hand moments, which we had to catch through long processes of translation. Through a series of meetings at cafes, Igor’s studio in Odivelas, a visit to his work at Culturgest, and WhatsApp group exchanges, what emerged was a non-linear montage of what we, as the five curators, understood. Neither had Igor found the need to discourage us from what we made of it, nor did he concern himself with expanding upon our readings. Our curatorial stance was similar to that of the audience, with hardly any overlap in what we made of his work, making the concept note, but rather one reading of what Igor’s research could be about.
The process of distancing himself from what becomes of the artwork, albeit not technically, allowed for the experience to provoke individual journeys for each audience member who encountered it. While the audience on the day of the opening were educated, in some ways, on the way one attends to artistic experiences, a workshop conducted with the students from Maria Barroso School on 19 April 2024 was exemplary of how his absence allowed for the work to accumulate various lives. When asked about the feeling the piece evoked, the students' responses ranged from notions of calmness and curiosity to fear, uncertainty, and discomfort. To be able to gather such diverse experiences must say something about the title of the exhibition. While the plausibility of the existence of a Time Machine could be debated, a way to consider the effects of the title could be by considering what it means to time travel.
In the note created for the students by one of the five curators—Joana Nóbrega—she poses a way to conceive the experience of a time machine and how the arts specifically could be a way to experience the phenomenon: "If time travel were possible, even without machines, how could we do it? Could art in general and this sculpture in particular make us travel through time, but how? And in some ways, Igor presents one answer to this: of all the image-reading practices that can produce clairvoyance, astrology is one of the most widely recognised and ancient techniques. Time Machine pursues the nostalgic idea that there is a predestined melody and uses the astrological chart as a musical production tool." Yet, in other ways, the overabundance of symbols, sounds, meanings, and experiences, along with his interpretation of the work, allows various disclosures to exist within the linear temporal landscape of the world clock.
Spending time on the various interpretations is as exhaustive a task as debating on the plausibility of time machines. Yet Igor foregrounds the multitude of experiences that allow for the emergence of non-dominant ways of perceiving time. His delicately interweaved data takes time away from its association with the ticking of clocks into the realm of a sonic hum made up of movement. Time in his work is suspended and expanded into micro-temporal landscapes of the individual operating within the melody of the celestial movements. Moreover, by connecting the physicality of the space to the space out there, Time Machine conveys a kind of communicability with universes outside the clock time, compelling us to ask whether, in the moment of the experience, Igor is a part of a cohort of artists who make a different kind of time travel possible.
Time Machine (2023), by Igor Jesus — a multi-media installation which revolves around an electronic sculpture — was curated by Teresa Weinholtz, Ida Svee, Joana Nóbrega, Rosalind Murphy, and Aishwarya Kumar. Holding on to the fourth dimension: Reflections on Igor Jesus’s Time Machine is a text, reflection, dissection, preservation, or anatomy about the thinking, practice, and personality that is Igor Jesus’s Time Machine. The project is part of AYNI — Theorems of Reciprocity, initiated by Luísa Santos, professor of the MA and PhD curatorship seminar within the international programme in Culture Studies, The Lisbon Consortium, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas and Universidade Católica Portuguesa. With the support of República Portuguesa — Cultura | DGARTES — Direção-Geral das Artes.
Aishwarya Kumar is a first-year PhD candidate in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and an FCT scholarship holder. A practice-based researcher, her work is positioned at intersections of corporeality, curation and decolonial spatial formations. With a B. Des in Information Arts from India and an RMA in Performance Studies from the Netherlands, she has worked as a performer, art director, curator, and creative producer in film, theater and visual and applied arts. Her recent work and writings are available through Transmission in Motion (2020), Junctions Journal (2021), ARIAS, Amsterdam (2022), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), and 4K/less (2023). In the past, she has been on the advisory board of SPHERE. She has also been involved in curatorial capacities with Instytut B61, IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture], and G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture.
Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro.
Igor Jesus. Photo © Curatorial Team of AYNI.