Charles Merewether

Iliko Zautashvili’s recent installation Time Disappears in Time is composed of pillows imprinted with the calendar that are placed on the floor and upon these pillows lie flat screen monitors.

The monitors show images of water flowing in opposite directions. There is a peacefulness of the room with its pillows and images of flowing water. And yet, the installation does not conjure the space of dreams, disrupted as it is by the presence and inexorable passage of time. Images are shown of water flowing in opposite directions as it moving into the past and the future just as a figure appears standing at a bridge, in-between spaces.

Emblematic of this disturbance, the present becomes a suspended point in-between time providing a stillness that is a comforting moment of respite and yet whose conditions of possibility are determined by what lies before and after, past and therefore no longer, future and unknown. The curiosity of this question is to eradicate the significance one may give to both the past and the future. Neither provide certainty of assurance. This, in turn, produces a form of suspended freedom, the freedom of the present moment, a still point hovering between time and place and therefore belongs to neither nor to itself. What is given nonetheless is the space, the space that art demands of time to be given, a space in which one finds a way to take measure of the inexorable presence.

for the catalogue Given Difference, Pier 92, New York, 2008.