Unfixing time, cultivating agency and healing

Time is intimately linked to the exercise and experience of human rights and social justice. The linear way we measure time, and the constant erosion of contemplative space, are not conducive to recognising and holding space for the messiness of human experience of abuse, justice, and redress. In this blog, Tallulah Lines reflects on how the arts can unfix our notion of time to help approach these issues, drawing on interviews carried out with artists for Art Rights Truth.

‘Be Good to my Memories’ (2023) Wezile Harmans. Image reproduced with permission from the artist.

Introduction

Time is intimately linked to the exercise and experience of human rights and social justice. For example, the effects of painful events and abuses which occurred in the past spill over into people’s everyday lives in the present, but this persistent impact may not be properly acknowledged or resolved where there is emphasis on ‘forgetting’ or ‘moving on’. Furthermore, at a time of intersecting crises and attacks on rights and social justice – taking place within political and economic capitalist culture which exploits us to the detriment of our health, happiness and fundamental rights – finding ways to imagine alternative futures for ourselves and our communities can also help infuse our lives in the present day with hope and a sense of agency.

In this blog, I argue that the arts can cultivate a relationship with time that can address some of the issues above, through emphasising connection, reflection and healing. This happens during the process of creating art, and can be captured in finished artworks. Observing finished artworks can also be an invitation for the audience to experience time differently and in doing so, have the opportunity to develop their own critical reflections. Engaging with art is an invitation to take time, as well as to spend it. I draw on interviews carried out with artists and activists as part of the Covid Legacies strand of Art Rights Truth, whose words and ideas have inspired me to dig deeper into thinking about the relationship between art, time and human rights.

Time Travelling

Artists and activists alike agreed that one of the most powerful things about creating art was that it permitted a sort of travelling in time, where moments from the ‘past’ or imagined for the ‘future’ become tangible in the present. An artwork produced is both evidence of a process which included connection, reflection and healing related to different moments in time, and a stimulus for furthering these. 

For South Africa-based performance and multimedia artist Wezile Harmans, the dialogical research he carries out is one of the most powerful parts of his creative process, and involves constantly oscillating between moments in time that helps strengthen the connection between him and the person whose story inspires his art. When he listens to people tell their stories, he ‘take[s] up the voice, how it becomes so soft, how it becomes so loud, how he or she pause[s], and how it continues,’ and as a result, he says, ‘I was there. Maybe I wasn't there on an actual event, but… the way they speak about that - when I go to studio and start creating work, it becomes not just work, a part of me felt, I can hear their voices, or I can see how they're holding - if they were smoking that cigarette, how they were folding their arms, how that make them uncomfortable, comfortable, how it reminded them of what happened.’ When Wezile embodies the memories or stories of others in his work, I imagine the extra weight and perhaps sense of validation the memories must acquire, and the emotional and critical space that must open up for the artist, for the people who inspired his work, and for those engaging with it.

From India, Pooja Dhingra, a graphic designer and art director who has collaborated with several NGOs, reflected on how creating art helped women come to terms with the extent of the impact of Covid-19 on their daily lives, and importantly, how to imagine futures for themselves in the aftermath of the pandemic. She identifies an important setback in the everyday lives of many women who had finally gained some freedom before the pandemic, only to see this reversed during lockdowns when ‘suddenly they're stuck at home with their husbands and their sons, you know, always kind of spying on them or just telling them what to do.’

In this context, the motivation behind the collaborative project Stitching Futures was to help women envisage their return to the public realm after Covid. Not only does this help recall past experiences – in this case, life before the pandemic – but it also helps to look forward in a way that is restorative of agency. The impact of the forced return to domestic confinement was obvious, Pooja says, in the way that the women who participated in Stitching Futures at first struggled to express their own dreams or hopes for the future, focussing instead on what they wanted for their husbands and children. This is not surprising, if we think about how those who take on traditional caring roles in the home tend to put their own needs last. But, by the end of the workshops, Pooja says, women were ‘actually talking about what they wanted to do with their lives, you know? On the first day it was just so impossible for us to get them to do that.’ This demonstrates the importance of having, on the one hand, the space and time to reflect critically and freely on one’s own position, and on the other, importantly, the artistic tools to make a physical representation of how you would like that position to change. 

Agency in Looking

There is ample potential for art objects that traverse time spans to impact on the audience emotionally. Mexico-based activist Pablo Montaño argued in our interview that through juxtaposing the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ in his collaborative podcast 2050: El Fin Que No Fue (2025: The Ending That Never Was), he and his collaborators could tap into people’s emotions by drawing on nostalgia (past) and anger / hope (future). If people don’t just understand a problem, rather they feel it and recognise their connection to it, Pablo suggested, it follows that they may be more inclined to take action to address it.

However, as Wezile pointed out, this only happens if and when the audience decides to engage with an artwork. This is certainly something that Wezile does not want to force. He wants viewers to decide for themselves when they will engage with his work, and when they do, they should ‘take their time’. He presents this as an exercise of consent and free will, the antithesis to the rushed and controlled world we live in, in which he says, ‘the ability to think is slowly being taken away from us.’ In line with Wezile’s perspective, I understand the act of contemplating a piece of socially engaged art and formulating one’s own reflections on it as an act of resistance and healing. 

Closing thoughts

The arts can juxtapose past, present and future in a way which recognises and holds space for the messiness of human experience of abuse, justice, and redress. The arts can also invite people into an affective and critical space, providing stimulus to develop reflections and expressions of alternative ways of being, now and in the future. In these ways, the arts facilitate a different relationship with time, one which offers an antidote to the frequently exploitative nature of contemporary society, and simultaneously provides the opportunity and tools to engage in freedom of thought and expression. Unfixing time through processes of time travelling and juxtaposition, the arts can help address some key elements of human rights and social justice, including redress and reparation, freedom of thought and expression, and (re)gaining agency.