In this digital residency in collaboration with \u00c9rudit, writer and researcher Hanss Lujan Torres explores how time has been experienced and discussed in contemporary art. In responding to an earlier contemplation on the present, written over ten years ago, he employs letter writing as a temporal practice and form of time travel, tracing the evolving discourses on time throughout Esse <\/em>magazine\u2019s archives.<\/strong>
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Montr\u00e9al, July 17, 2025<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Dear Marie-Eve, <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What strange and funny timing. During my digital residency, for which I proposed to explore how time is discussed in contemporary art, I came across your article, \u201cLetter on the Present,\u201d written for Esse<\/em>\u2019s thirtieth anniversary in 2014. I was pleased, but not surprised, to see writers contending with time\u2019s shifting textures, anxieties, and the persistent intensity of the \u201cnow.\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
While browsing Esse<\/em>\u2019s archives, I noticed how reflections on time surface during moments of commemoration and retrospection. Your letter and other articles in the Being Thirty<\/em> issue grappled with a digitally accelerating present, just as ten years earlier, the Utopie et dystopie<\/em> issue, marking the magazine\u2019s twentieth anniversary, was also interrogating the feeling of time, but through the hopes and anxieties surrounding the imagined futures of the early 2000s. By the hundredth issue, aptly themed Futurity<\/em>, those envisioned futures had arrived. Time, it seems, folds inward with each milestone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those publications captured distinct perspectives on how the present was being felt, imagined, and understood in its moment. I am compelled to inform you that since you wrote your letter, time has collapsed at least once\u2014perhaps more than once, depending on who you ask\u2014and the world has shifted in ways that continue to reshape our relationship with it. Conversations on temporality in contemporary art have expanded inwardly, globally, and existentially. It is probably no coincidence that Esse<\/em> turned forty years old last year. Perhaps now is an opportune moment for an update.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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On Letter Writing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I am inspired by your approach to thinking about time in the form of a letter. Reading it more than a decade after it was written is a temporal experience that collapses time and bridges distance. Letters are gathering spaces to exchange ideas or, in this case, to meet. (Hi!) They can hold multiple moments at once, allowing us to experience the passage of time from distinct and shifting perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During this residency, I encountered an article in \u00c9rudit\u2019s archives by a group of geography scholars who considered all the temporal dimensions of letter writing. In the journal ACME<\/em>\u2019s special issue titled \u201cDesirable Futures,\u201d its editors, Mabel Gergan, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Caitlin McMillan, Sara Smith, and Pavithra Vasudevan, position epistolary practices as a form of time travel.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Mabel Gergan, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Caitilin McMillan, Sara Smith, and Pavithra Vasudevan, \u201cDesirable Futures: Write Me a Letter,\u201d ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies<\/em> 23, no. 2 (2024): 91\u2013106, accessible online.<\/span> What I found most compelling, however, is their exploration of the decolonial and feminist potentials of the letter as a medium. They cite letter exchanges from historical and contemporary contexts, including those between Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, whose writings provided a space for care, solidarity, and resistance as Black lesbian feminists navigating complex political terrains. They also reference the more recent exchange between Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who wrote to one another during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to think through Black and Indigenous futurities while reckoning with the growing racial, colonial, and ecological crises of 2020. At its core, these exchanges foreground relational knowledge and show how writing across time can be a form of critical and collective world-building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I recently saw an Instagram reel referencing James Baldwin\u2019s 1971 letter to Angela Davis, in which he wrote, in response to her arrest, \u201cIf they take you in the morning, they\u2019ll be coming for us that night.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - YK Hong (@ykreborn), \u201cAlways be ready already. Interdependence to collective liberation…<\/em>,\u201d video, April 18, 2025, Instagram, https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/DIlh5h0O30F\/<\/a>; James Baldwin, \u201cAn Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,\u201d The New York Review of Books<\/em>, January 7, 1971, accessible online.<\/span> Baldwin\u2019s words, rooted in 1970s political struggles, resonate loudly today. Gentle yet forceful, letters are soft archives preserving thoughts and feelings that carry a latent power to rupture the present with echoes from the past. Coming across this letter via Instagram, of all places, also reminded me how letters have a way of finding us\u2014just as I found yours or, perhaps, how it found me. All this makes a letter exchange feel like the ideal space to explore our tangled relationship with time and the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Present, Then and Now<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I was struck by your analysis of how thirty-something artists experienced time in 2014. Your observations on the pressures of modernity and the accelerations of technology and communication still resonate. But I must admit that today, the idea of being a \u201cthirty-something\u201d feels more ambiguous. I understand it as a generational timeframe tied to broader normative life-stage expectations. Artistically, it often signals a shift beyond training years and the \u201cemerging\u201d or \u201cyoung\u201d categories. Yet, amid ongoing economic precarity and institutional instability, milestones such as home ownership, parenthood, and a \u201csuccessful\u201d career feel not just delayed but impossible or simply no longer relevant for some of us. I imagine that the artists you wrote about have aged from that frame, but I suspect some are still reeling from the temporal dislocations of the early pandemic, when time stalled and accelerated at once. It felt like living inside Patrick Bernatchez\u2019s BW<\/em>, which you referenced, in which a single revolution takes a thousand years. For some, lockdowns and missed celebrations arrested development; for others, those years stretched on endlessly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Your letter introduced me to the work of the historian Fran\u00e7ois Hartog and his concept of \u201cpresentism.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Marie-Eve Beaupr\u00e9, \u201cLetter on the Present,\u201d trans. Ron Ross, Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, March 11, 2014, accessible online.<\/span> This idea of the dominance of the present over both the past and the future makes sense as a Western cultural condition for the 2010s, a decade during which accelerated communication technologies reshaped our temporal experience, compressing historical time into anever-intensifying now. Today, this feels even more acute\u2014heavier, even\u2014with the growing presence of artificial intelligence and the pervasive influence of social media and algorithmic systems. This hyper-present time privileges speed, immediacy, and simultaneity. It is relentless and overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That may be why we gravitate toward art. It offers a way to make sense of the oversaturation of the present.<\/strong> Your observations on how artists embrace slowness, monotony, and contemplation provide a helpful lens for thinking about how art contends with the now. Interestingly, another article in the Being Thirty<\/em> issue also references Hartog and presentism, complicating it in relation to contemporary art. In \u201cHistorical Time Ecologized,\u201d Christine Ross agrees that modernity and presentism have altered our relationship with time. However, she argues that contemporary art does more than merely reflect presentism. \u201cPrivileging the present\u201d in this context does not always come at the expense of the past or the future; instead, it can serve as a critical platform for building new temporal imaginaries.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Christine Ross, \u201cHistorical Time Ecologized,\u201d trans. K\u00e4the Roth, Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, March 11, 2014,<\/span> Ross references works by Marjetica Port\u010d, Francis Al\u00ffs, Pierre Hughe, and David Altmejd that circulate on ecologically grounded and durational forms of time to resist the accelerations of modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Ross\u2019s argument feels prescient, and it seems that Hartog has since come around. In a 2022 interview discussing the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of presentism, Hartog noted how this crisis underscored an already growing awareness of humanity\u2019s relationship with nature. He said, \u201cWe have reduced dramatically the earth\u2019s biodiversity. What is completely new today is that humanity has become a geological force unto itself. This is what\u2019s meant by the Anthropocene … It puts our whole view of the modern world\u2014our vision of progress, our mastery over nature\u2014in doubt.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Hartog quoted in Bernhard Warner, \u201cWork from Home Is Distorting Our Sense of Time\u2014and It\u2019s Still March,\u201d interview with Fran\u00e7ois Hartog, Fortune<\/em>, July 12, 2020, accessible online.<\/span> It\u2019s a notable yet limited shift. Although Hartog gestures toward ecological urgency, the Anthropocene framework universalizes responsibility and obscures the uneven, ongoing colonial, racial, and capitalist forces that feed this overbearing presentism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t want to dismiss presentism entirely\u2014I see it as a helpful framework for understanding the societal dynamics and feelings of time. I also do not wish to disregard ecological approaches to time, as these are vital and omnipresent, but I think that to truly address the feelings of the contemporary moment, we need this framework to engage with the politics of now. Presentism signals a loss of historicity, so rather than confronting it with another broad meta-narrative such as the Anthropocene, a more effective approach is to attend to micro-histories and localized experiences grounded in the present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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To speak of time\u2014its structures and textures\u2014we must begin with the personal. And the personal, as we know, is political. Time<\/em> is political.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The Now, Now<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Over the past year, I have noticed a growing number of exhibitions centred around videos that contemplate the experience of time. I must admit that when browsing through galleries, I have the bad habit of passing by video works, telling myself that I\u2019ll return when time allows, although it rarely does. Lately, I have found myself slowing down for them, drawn in by the ways they hold time. Two recent exhibitions stand out as powerful examples of how artists grapple with the urgencies of the present while revealing the layered, often fraught nature of time. They remind us that the present is anything but flat, and that time is never neutral. In her 2024 solo exhibition A Temporary Loss of Consciousness<\/em> at Galerie Eli Kerr, Joyce Joumaa used time-based media and the metaphor of Earth\u2019s orbit around the sun to depict Lebanon\u2019s ongoing power shortages. The title holds an interesting double meaning, referring both to electrical blackouts and to the personal experience of disorientation, delay, and temporal suspension. It builds uncertainty and intimacy. In her six-channel video Mutable Cycles II<\/em>, displayed on screens resembling a solar panel, Joumaa examines the use of solar energy in the city of Tripoli amidst the current and ongoing socio-political and economic crises. Intermittent and meditative recordings of domestic rooftop scenes are layered with news coverage of the 2021 protests that erupted following the country\u2019s massive blackout, forming a dialogue between electrical power and collective people power. Circling this work were five circuit-breaker boxes repurposed as photo lightboxes, illuminated for a sanctioned amount of time that corresponded to the electricity schedules of the depicted buildings. I was struck by how Joumaa underscored the precarity and fragility of time by framing quotidian moments in mundane objects. The material infrastructure becomes a way to trace personal and collective experiences of disruption, and the images present these seemingly trivial instances of light as profoundly precious. In her review of the exhibition, Irem Karaasian emphasizes how time was felt within the exhibition: \u201cWe inevitably succumbed to an overwhelming sense of frustration, a phase marked by ethical lapses in which we acquiesced and resigned ourselves to the prevailing circumstances presented in the works.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Irem Karaaslan, \u201cJoyce Joumaa: A Temporary Loss of Consciousness,\u201d Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, November 9, 2024, accessible online.<\/span> I suspect that these feelings arose from the unsettling experience of encountering historical time within the present moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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