“Time is A Mother.”

-   Ocean Vuong, Not Even

“I’m always out of step with the clock of the historical.”

-   Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

What is time, and how do we experience it? Recent and ongoing events have made us all aware that time is as fragile as it is precious. If the order of time were to collapse, for whom would it matter?

The passage of time depends on our frame of reference. Feminist and decolonial studies explain that our current perception of time is a social construct. Time binds, disciplines, and imposes social norms. Time as we know it is a structuring device that upkeeps traditions and life cycles that reinforce normative behaviours and colonial narratives. Time As Relative features temporalities unmediated by the structures of colonialism and heteronormativity from trans, queer, and non-binary perspectives. The artists in the exhibition share their nuanced understandings of time—ones that are fluid, non-linear, infinite, and subjective.

This exhibition particularly ruminated on the complexities of queerness and family, offering poetic and interconnected dialogues on how these have coexisted in the past and how their connection may expand and even form new temporal and relational dynamics. The title of this exhibition served as both a provocation and a metaphor. It is a reminder of the theory of relativity, which proposes that time is relative to one’s experience, but also, time can be personified as a relative. Time can be queer and ancestral, kindred, and generational.

Curated by Hanss Lujan Torres, Time As Relative featured work by Arielle Twist, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Kama La Mackerel, Léuli Eshrāghi, and Lucas LaRochelle.

Time As Relative was on view in the Main Gallery from September 16 to October 22, 2022.

This project was made possible with the support of The Audain Foundation.

Works from left to right: Kama La Mackerel, LOVE FOR TRANS WOMEN OF COLOUR, multimedia, 2015 and Lucas LaRochelle (QT.bot), Sitting here with you in the future, digital prints, 2019 installed in the Main Gallery of the Alternator.