In Time @ 272 High Holborn Oct 15 & 16

In Time is a group show that explores the subject of time and is taking place this Friday and Saturday at Blueprint, 272 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EY.

The show comprising screenings, installation and performance seeks to examine time as duration, material, and as concept and process.

RSVP: info@samnightingale.com


Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life will be screened during the exhibition, between 5.30 - 6.30pm on Friday 15th October and again on Saturday 16th of October between 2.30 - 3.30pm.

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life addresses time through the relationship between the still and moving image. The film looks at the concept of time as it is first arrested in the still photographic image (as a moment that is isolated and taken out of time) and then (re)animated as a moving image in digital video. This experimental film takes the analogue photograph as its source material and transforms the still-ness of photography into the dynamic movement of film. 

Olympic Changes originates from six medium-format photographic negatives taken from a moving train. Each of the negatives were digitally scanned and repeatedly divided and cropped to make 600 separate images – each becoming a frame in the film. Movement is re-animated through digital video to reflect the play of motion present at the original moment of capture. The frames of the film are sequenced in such a way that the viewer not only journeys through the changing urban landscape, but also journeys through each of the six still photographs. Witnessed is the banality of an everyday train journey, entwined with the structural changes taking place to the urban environment around the Olympic site in East London.


Further details concerning In Time can be found at: http://intimeexhibition.wordpress.com/

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progess part two

I have been thinking about the work of Tacita Dean and how it relates to some of the concerns I am interested to explore in the project Traversal. While researching Dean’s work recently, I came across a number of short texts she has written that are included in the final section of a book published by Phaidon. The text that I found most interesting and perhaps most enlightening about her practice is entitled Tristan da Cunha. In it Dean writes of her fantasy of visiting the most remote island in the world, which is apparently Tristan da Cunha, to be left there for a year without any form of communication with the outside world, apart from the mail boat which appears once a year. She re-tells a dream, where she had the realisation that when the mail boat arrived, it would also be the same boat that would mark the end of her year and facilitate her return home; this thought of leaving panicked her and she felt disappointed at the letters she could not send or receive – of all the news she could not get.

Not only is the journey (so far) an unrealised fantasy, but also a fantasy of a world where you can get lost; as Dean explains, even Tristan da Cunha has a satellite public phone and the governor now has email. So time moves relentlessly on for this remote and distant land too. It is clear to see from the text that Dean hungers for these spaces where one can dream of becoming lost, where linear time has little meaning and the past and the future are all somehow present in the now. In conclusion Dean writes, ‘So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth’s edges – to the desert and to the sea, or to the ice at the bottom of the world, or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux like that of the sea or the or the shifting dunes of the desert, or one brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can image prehistory and can see the future.’

Accompanying the text are reproductions of an old postcard and photograph, both images of an unstated location or date, both have German words painted in white across them indicating aspects of what is pictured.


Tacita Dean, Himmel/See, 2005.


Tacita Dean, Luft/Immergrune/Sandboden, 2005.

For me Dean’s fascination with time resonates with Henri Bergson concept of durée (duration): the dynamic movement of passing yet continuing time, in other words time that is not divisible into past and future, but is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is this concept of durée that is in my mind when I consider some of the still images from Traversal.


Sam Nightingale, Untitled (Traversal series)