Kate Rannells Born/Home Oakland, California Education MA/MFA, History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, 2019 katerannells.com Fractal Pasts, Fluid Presents, and Intersectional Futures: Aesthetic Resistances to Temporal Hegemony In the present moment, racism, xenophobia, and social, economic, and racial inequality in places like the United States and Europe are the outward and obvious legacies of centuries of colonialism and slavery. While state-condoned racism, restrictive immigration policies, and an entrenched military industrial complex may be some of the more visible effects, one of the more insidious and naturalized forms of colonization is the globally imposed Western construct of time. From the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time, to the carving of the planet into commercially expedient time zones, local traditions of time have been superseded by a universalized and hegemonic system based on the atomic clock. In other words, the adage “Time is money” is not so much a metaphor, but a reality that has erased the embodied experience of time. My thesis asks: How are artists resisting this temporal hegemony? I examine the strategies of temporal resistance in the time-based works of John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, Black Quantum Futures, Hyphen Labs, and Cauleen Smith. By combining varied visual and audio strategies with new technologies, or immersive environments, often with Afrofuturist frameworks, these artists either overtly disrupt temporal linearity or completely evade the temporal constructs that define the present condition. Using selected
artworks from 1982 to 2018, I argue that their aesthetic and theoretical strategies not only resist, elude, and evade oppressive temporal constructs, but also provide new ways to conceive of time that are embodied, discursive, generative, inclusive, and intersectional.
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Space-Time, collage by Kate Rannells The resource materials and inspiration for this collage include NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (2016), a Virtual Reality project by Hyphen-Labs; BlackWomxnTemporal.net (2018), an ongoing online project by Black Quantum Futurism Collective (Camae Ayewa and Rasheeda Phillips); Black Audio Film Collective’s Expeditions 1: Signs of Empire (1983) and The Last Angel of History (1998); Space Station: Two Rebeccas (2018), a multimedia installation by Cauleen Smith; and Vertigo Sea (2015), a three-channel HD video installation by John Akomfrah.