Puck Wacki’s final presentation can best be described as impressive but also nerve jangling chaos. Asynchronous ticking is heard from four sides: sand drips irregularly from a sack, nails fall and inexorably continue ticking while cooking alarms go off randomly. In the centre of the space stands a mixing panel, where all the elements of the installation come together. This allows Wacki to determine how loud or soft something sounds.
You could think of this mixing panel as a metaphor for the artist's head. “I'm very impatient and have ADHD, which means my head is very busy", says Wacki. She started exploring time at the academy. “I developed a hyper focus on the concept of time and, for example, I am always working with useful things and never take time for myself.” Her research revealed that in art, time is regarded more as something circular than as something linear. She wanted to design both a new time and show the time that is ‘past’ and turn it into something tangible. The sandbag embodies the absence of time. When you walk past it, it causes a plate to vibrate and the sand spreads over the floor, whereas if you don't, the sand remains in an even heap.
A strange sculpture made up of candles and nails draws your attention. “In my dissertation, I discussed how art consciously or unconsciously wants to liberate itself from the linear clock, which I translate to binary data whose graphic score I then convert into moulds which I arranged around the candles. When you light them, it causes nails to fall out over the course of 70 hours. The fact that you are waiting nervously for them to fall, delays time. There is also very interesting contrast between computer data which are exact and this material which is not."
Her deconstruction of time is also politically informed. “Time is a capitalistic construct. For example, in the past the mine owners had a clock which they would turn back so that the miners had to work longer. If you go into space, the same time behaves differently. For instance, close to a black hole, 10 minutes no longer lasts 10 minutes but 10 years. I want to show that there are different rhythms for dealing with life and also seek out the discomfort within anticipation.”
Author: Inge Pollet, curator and poet
