Making Time

Making Time is a new initiative that responds to the climate emergency, bringing the ideas of artists and art production into conversation with new material possibilities. Artangel, Science Gallery London, Brighton CCA and Radar at the University of Loughborough have partnered to facilitate a year of experimentation. The year-long programme supports artists to innovate, experiment, explore, fail, and succeed in the production of new materials. 

Image: Digitised drawing by Abbas Zahedi, 'anything goes', 2014, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Abbas Zahedi has long been interested in Sarat Maharaj’s 2002 essay, Xeno-Epistemics. In this text, Maharaj refers to art knowledge as ‘a matter of inventing other ways of thinking-knowing […] other epistemological engines [… and] ways of knowing otherness.’ The work Abbas has developed for Making Time builds upon this idea, specifically, he asks how to make an ‘art that is not Art’ and how to perform research without performing ‘Research,’ to make other modes of thinking-knowing possible. Abbas has proposed a course of actions that partly forgo (and, at the same time, aim to broaden) the material basis of artistic production. As a process of ‘becoming-other-than-material’ – through dialogues, embodiment and (quantum) experimentation - Abbas hopes that this course will reopen and enliven discourses that go beyond the binary of material/immaterial. And further, how this ‘becoming’ can be extended beyond corporeal contact. For Abbas, this course of actions is more about material expansion than conceptual closure.

Images: (above) Abbas Zahedi performing in Basement94’s London workshop for the FT. Photography: Dan Wilton; (left) Abbas Zahedi, performance of Rose and STEMM , 2019. Photography: Katarzyna Perlak. Courtesy of ICF. 

Phosphorous has tremendous transformative figurative potential. It holds the chemical, the geopolitical and the cosmological together. Originating in dying sun-like stars and supernovae, on Earth, it is found in the mineral form of Phosphate rock. Largely mined in Western Sahara, this finite non-manufacturable resource is central to the production of synthetic fertiliser, and therefore critical for the operation of agribusiness. The dependency to this mineral is also tightly embroiled with the (im)possibility of self-determination for the peoples of Western Sahara. As such, FRAUD also considers the “historiographical invisibility” of extractive practices undergrounding fertiliser production. As phosphate has begun choking ocean beds with the accumulation of agricultural run-off, causing the eutrophication of waterways and ocean spaces, FRAUD wish to expand their investigation into waterways and sewage discharge. As Making Time recipients, FRAUD will be dedicated to the material exploration of sewage phosphate extraction and pigment development as well as to cultivate critically reflexive art-science collaborations.

Images: (above) Photography by Tim Bowditch; (left) FRAUD, Fictions of the Primitive, 2020. Glass-blown by Torsten Rötzsch and Louise Lang. Made with conflict sand from Playa Taurito (Gran Canarias), 38 x 26 x 28 cm. Photo by Hannah Young.

From zero-hours contracts or 8-week international exhibition runs, today, much professional art practice in the UK functions in a largely extractive and colonial manner, predicated on the exploitation of labour, mobility and resources and denying culpability in a world of ecocide, violence and contradiction. Transitioning from toxic high-energy and wasteful systems to low-carbon and circular practices in the arts could disrupt these patterns, creating lighter and more equitable circuits of exhibition, prestige, and funding but this is far from guaranteed; and as the UK continues to experience austere spending cuts, volatility and uncertainty, historic divisions in power and opportunity are likely to deepen – in the arts and elsewhere. During the Making Time period, Dani Admiss will spend time with the available departments at King’s College London, Loughborough University and University of Brighton to develop a collaboratively authored and intersectional ‘roadmap’ towards a just and circular world for art workers in the UK and beyond. Drawing on research in abolition, open-ended pedagogy, palliative care and pyschoaffective and relational practices, she will co-create a public declaration and direction for future livability.

Images: (above) Dani Admiss, Standing by The Stones of Stenness, Orkney. Photography: Ellen Greig; (below) Dani Admiss, Sunlight Doesnt Need a Pipeline (2022) Stanley Picker Gallery installation view. Photography: Ellie Laycock.

They propose Making Time through volcanoes, alongside science and engineering, learning from ideas in origin of life studies – OOL – or Abiogenesis: materiality expressing agency and life. Novel material engineering in the geological and biological –acknowledging geological matter as the political object is it, in this case through the lens of the volcanic. Cross disciplinary questions they’ll address across research in all networks of this project include: What makes geological material political? What conditions give rise to abiogenesis? What materials of volcanic activity are used for climate remediation? Can volcanic materials be incorporated into sustainable sculpture practice rooted in queer, sick, feminist, de-colonial, intersectional social justice, and environmental care? Can they make like a volcano?

Images: (above) Rachel Pimm portrait; (left) Rachel Pimm, PLATES, 2019.

Making Time is devised by Artangel and produced in partnership with Science Gallery London at King's College London. The programme is supported by Brighton CCA at the University of Brighton and Radar at Loughborough University.

Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels. 

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