From 16th January 2015
Campus in Camps, Al Feneiq Center (Dheisheh Refugee Camp)

by Nathan Witt

A presentation of ongoing ideas about the difficulty of positing ourselves verbally, spatially and in time. This project started in Jerusalem in 2012, thinking about how people, for over 1500 years, cannot collectively agree on what year it is, or what days of the week to work and rest. The work set about streaming communal activity from Google calendar set to Ha’luach, Hijri, a Persian solar/lunar calendar and Christian Gregorian and Julian times to a Tumblr account. This shared everyday existence has looked at how we work and live amongst disparate epochs and the history of year zeros, such as atomic time standard or carbon dating.

These things are not just religious but we ourselves are continually subjected to living in varying states of technical asynchronizaton, disychronization and synchronization, to both hardware and software. They are also cognitive states, such as the hypothesis that the past is perceived in the left region of the brain, that damage to the right hemisphere, strokes for example, affect time perception. And finally, there is an overriding interest in looking at other historically aberrant examples of dromology, where England had the wrong time for 150 years due to a Papal Schism, or the French having a digital calendar after the Revolution with 100 second minutes, 100 minute hours, 10 days a week…

Biographical note

Nathan Witt (UK) is a text-based artist.

Recent exhibitions include: Concerning the Bodyguard; The Tetley, Leeds (2014), A Museum of Immortality, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2014); Proxy Special, Platform, Belfast (2014); NOA III (Not Only Arabic) Research Week at 98 Weeks, Beirut, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Lissabon and AIR Antwerpen (2013); Points of Departure, Al Mahatta Gallery, Ramallah (2013); The Really Wild Show, The White Building, London (2012). Forthcoming exhibition at CCA, Gallery Glasgow.

Nathan writes for Through Europe  and has written NOOO and e-book about ecology and mania for [SPACE] Studios, London; also texts for MakhZIN 98 Editions, Beirut; Badlands, New York; Arnolfini; Haroon Mirza and Or-Bits.com