Metabolising Time – Propositions for Countering Linearity

For centuries, the Western conception of time has been shaped by a single narrative of civilization: that of progress, acceleration, standardization, control, and technological mastery. Time as a linear horizon – something to be conquered, optimised, manipulated and possessed. It is a concept built upon the promises of modernity and inextricably linked to its violence: colonialism, ecological devastation, racial capitalism, and the systematic suppression of other ways of inhabiting and processing time.

Metabolising Time brings together artistic practices that resist this dominant model. Rather than reproducing the prevailing image of ‘time’ as a singular, forward-moving destiny, the installations brought together at MU focus on multiple ways of structuring duration: cyclical, repetitive, embodied, ancestral, geological, and more-than-human. What emerges, then, is not a single time but many overlapping, conflicting, and unequally distributed forms of time.

Metabolising time is therefore not merely a matter of representing time differently, but of processing time – internally, materially and collectively. Metabolism – whether it takes place in the body of a prehistoric mammoth or in bacterial cells – is always a form of transformation through incorporation: what is taken in is broken down, reassembled, and released again in a modified form. This means that time does not exist outside us, but flows through bodies, ecologies, and matter itself.

Metabolising Times: Rhythms beyond linearity creates a space for such processes. What unfolds here are not fixed narratives or singular trajectories, but ongoing negotiations with time itself – its sediments, its fractures, its rhythms and its potential new compositions.

Metabolising Time is curated in a collaborative way by Rawad Baaklini, Marijn Bril, Alexander Burenkov and Angelique Spaninks.

MU

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The Netherlands