54,830 Years: Archipelagos of Order

A video unfolds the passing of days—slow meditative transitions building narratives through the eyes of its anonymous subject. The predictable routine flow of light swelling to darkness and back again.

This video, subject to a program tasked to shuffle each narrative element it contains, will run for 54,830 years before those same two moments ever touch again. A consistently new present of the same content negates the present that has just passed. 54,830 years of the different within the identical.

Connected to the video and its program is a host of kinetic sculptural elements. Driven by the same code they form a composite sculptural environment that continually rearranges itself, presenting a new formation with each progression.

For this exhibition the architecture of Studio17 houses a multitude of temporalities that overlap and cannot be resolved into one, simple designation. Visitors are presented with multiple ways of narrating and recording time—not a passing of events, but a slow physical sedimentation.

Relaxation oscillations and cascading divisions, archipelagos of order in oceans of chaos.

Robin Everett (b.1989) graduated from the Bergen Academy of Art MA programme in 2018 and continues to live and work in Norway. Through the time-critical media of video and testing the more concrete perimeters of text and sculpture, Everett plays with an asynchronous ontology of time that does not proceed in one unified rhythm of experience. His practice addresses this situation as a cartography of multiple levels, processes, and conceptualisations of time overlapping, where a geologic slowness is intricately entangled with micro-temporalities beyond our sensory capacities.