TIME

 Text by Mike Watson


The exhibition Time reflects on a theme so fundamental to human life that we often forget about it altogether: the passing of time and of epochs. It is a fact as ubiquitous and necessary to us as the air we breathe, making it difficult to consider in itself. Indeed, reflection on time is a pursuit mostly carried out by children, teenagers, and philosophers. However, even as we avoid thinking for sustained periods on the phenomenon of time, the physical phenomenon — inseparable from space — routinely intrudes upon our daily lives, helping to shape them.

The artist Marko Rantanen presents a show exploring the theme of temporality and the way in which it gives shape both to our present existence and our future aspirations. The exhibition, entitled simply Time, features nearly 30 photographic prints of stratified cross-sections of the city of Venice that express its history and current decay.

In Venice, water is an element that brings regular intrusive reminders of time’s passing. Due to its location within a tidal lagoon, high tides often flood the city — a problem that is worsening with rising sea levels caused by climate change. This problem threatens the disappearance of Venice, as it — along with the Maldives — may be uninhabitable within one to two centuries. It is easy to imagine that other countries and cities would have resolved this issue by damming the waters, which routinely rise due to flash storms and tides, in order to protect a world heritage city that has become a center for global tourism.

In reality, however, a dam has been planned in Venice for decades, and work even began on it in 2001, but investment was channeled into the pockets of corrupt officials — something sadly common in the Italian peninsula. The high tides that come increasingly as a result of this neglect are a sign of the sad fate of a once-great city now sinking under the weight of tourism and poor governance. The dam was projected to be completed in 2022, having missed numerous prior deadlines, though critics believe it will not be enough to save the city, given the rapidity of global warming.


Rantanen’s photographs brilliantly capture the passing of time in Venice and the city’s decline, as well as signs of its prior greatness. He does this not by focusing on grand monuments or iconic buildings, but by showing that while such grandeur reinforces the sensation of time’s passing, the minor details speak more profoundly to our personal, existential relationship with temporality. Rantanen captures surprising features — building decay, rusting pipes, long-disused ladders (as in Time XXVI), rough repairs, and random colour schemes resulting from successive interventions. These unwitting, manmade combinations — which interact in Rantanen’s photos with the peculiar grey-green of Venice’s canal water — are discovered by chance rather than sought out.

As such, they turn the logic of tourism on its head. Instead of seeking a famous monument only to find it surrounded by tourists taking photos with their latest Huawei or iPhone, one stumbles accidentally upon an unusual repair or area of damage (as seen in Time XXIII) that, in its decadence, intrudes upon the uniform space of the 21st century, offering a rude and sudden reminder of time’s passing — and of our mortality.

The decay of Venice provides an opportunity to reflect on the city in its original state as a refuge for endangered people. Founded in 421 AD by refugees fleeing Germanic invasion, by the 11th century it had become a leading Mediterranean power and a broker between East and West. Successive generations saw Venice grow and resist various adversaries, until it succumbed to Austrian invasion in 1798 and was subsequently incorporated into Revolutionary France’s Kingdom of Italy in 1805. Following a brief period of independence, it became part of the new Italian state in the late 1800s. Since then, it has remained a strongly independent outlier, albeit one that has been worn down by the forces of capitalism.

Though Venice — like its twisting alleyways and canals — still serves as a symbol of pre-modern times, undesigned and unsubordinated to the squeaky-clean demands of 21st-century capital, this is in spite of its vast tourist economy.

Today, as its indigenous population dwindles year by year, Venice has become a crossroads where numerous critical contemporary realities play out: climate change, gentrification, the problems of mass tourism, the global realignment of power from West to East, and migration. As a city that may disappear underwater within two or three generations, its fate is symbolic of the fate we all share — individually and as a species.

The strength of the exhibition Time lies in its ability to give the viewer gentle pause for reflection on these issues — something increasingly rare in the digital age.