The main premise behind "Time of Others" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MoT) is that there is no fixed self — "otherness" can be a matter of recognizing that our identities and qualities as people can change. The curatorial team behind the exhibition do not use "otherness" in its more postcolonial sense of constructed narratives of difference, but want visitors to consider it as an issue of alterity and an opportunity to think about selfhood.
According to MoT curator Che Kyongfa, the intellectual background to this is the work of the filmmaker, theorist, and artist Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Two works communicate Kyongfa's goal very succinctly. These are Motoyuki Shitamachi's "Dusk/Dawn Tsunagi/Chicago," a video work of the simultaneous sunrise and sunset recorded on either sides of the planet, and Bruce Quek's "The Hall of Mirrors," a minimalist array of clocks whose hands rotate at different speeds determined by averaged annual statistics for the Asia-Pacific region (deaths from stroke and carbon-dioxide emissions, for example).
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.