“Past Tense”

curated by Brooklyn Pakathi

The exhibition Past Tense invites us into an intimate encounter with time as a political dimension. Through installation and media art, the works expose how temporal frameworks structure power and ask how other temporalities might emerge when memory, sound, and image intervene in historical silences. Each work functions as a temporal intervention. They move beyond representation and actively reconfigure how time is experienced.

Frida Robles presents La Respuesta (The Answer), a textile installation that recalls the exchange between the Tlamatinime, Nahuatl wise men, and the first missionary friars in sixteenth-century Tenochtitlán-Tlatelolco. Their words named the enormity of deicide, genocide, and the annihilation of worlds. Robles brings this response into the present through bands of printed fabric that expose the persistence of colonial fantasies of progress. Her work transforms ancestral thought into a living critique, forcing the past to appear as an active presence that unsettles the conditions of the present.

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s Orí mi (ní ìrántí J.D. Ojeikere) (My head. A Homage to J.D. Ojeikere) extends her engagement with Yoruba cosmology and Ifá divination. Created through dialogue with artist and Ìṣẹ ̀ ṣẹ practitioner Prof. Jelili Atiku, the series draws on the Odù Ọ ̀ wọ́nrín Ogbè, a verse that emphasizes orí tútù (a calm head) and Ìwà pẹ ̀ lẹ́ (a balanced character). These principles position guidance from the ancestors as a path for aligning metaphysical and physical realms. In four analog self-portraits, Kazeem-Kamiński embodies this teaching by invoking orí, the head, as both personal destiny and spiritual center. Her homage to the Nigerian photographer J.D. Ojeikere situates the work within a lineage of Black image-making where inherited wisdom and artistic practice converge as temporal continuity.

Huda Takriti’s Fluid Grounds examines the contested memory practices of the Pied-noir community after the independence of Algeria. Through digital photo-montages and video collages, she places colonial propaganda and nostalgia in direct relation to the words of Frantz Fanon. Online traces of imagined returns, such as songs sung on Algerian shores or ashes scattered in playgrounds, reveal how colonial attachments persist as desire and distortion. Takriti stages these contradictions to ask what should remain visible and where opacity offers protection, generating temporal dissonance that interrupts simplified versions of history. Together, the works in Past Tense form chronopolitical fissures. Linear progress narratives collapse into cyclical temporalities. Colonial archives are unsettled by voices that speak against containment. The supposed neutrality of standardized time reveals its imperial foundations. These works invite us to inhabit temporal disorientation as a generative ground. They ask whose time counts, who sets the rhythms of life, and how futures might be created through a critical reckoning with what continues to haunt the present.

Adress: ifk arkaden, Reichsratsstraße 17. 1010 Vienna

Exhibition Opening with Brooklyn Pakathi:
Wed, 3. September – ifk arkaden, 16:00

Opening Hours:
Wed, 3. September, 16:00-18:00
Thu, 4. September, 15:00-20:00
Fri, 5. September, 12:00-18:30
Sat, 6. September, 14:00-18:30