In 2014, the KVFN presents the series of works diezeiten. It revolves around questions of time—of memory, presence, and future—about taking time for oneself (more than necessary), but above all about giving time to the other: to the artwork and to the fellow viewer. Ten works and two performances await the visitor. On the last Friday of each month, starting at 7 p.m., there will be an evening dedicated to a single artwork: with reflections, artist talks, readings, or discussions, accompanied by food and drink. For the following three weeks, only this one work will be on display. The visitor is challenged to engage with the “demand of the images”: to endure the work in its “silent essentiality”, through which it points us toward “an essentiality of ourselves” (Michael Brötje). One must focus—on the other and on the work itself. “The time of the other, as a gift, cannot be accelerated; [it] creates … shared time. It is good time.” —Byung-Chul Han

die zeiten: More Than Fifteen Minutes — ten evenings between January and October, each on the last Friday of the month — are devoted to a single artwork, which will then remain on view at the KvFn for three weeks. The deliberate focus on just one counterpart is the program’s core: ten highly concentrated encounters and engagements with a single work of art.

The exhibition spaces of the Kunstverein have been shaped around this 1:1 situation. An anteroom separates the abundance of the outside world from the stillness of the space dedicated to one work. On the mezzanine, an additional room—featuring a four-meter-long table, a shelf, and a growing archive accompanying the die zeiten series—serves as a place for lingering and discourse.

die zeiten positions itself as a deliberate response to one of the most pressing issues of our time: the unbearable acceleration and compression of temporal experience, coupled with an overwhelming surplus of information and events that escapes any grasp.

Curator / Text: Jörg van den Berg