45 minutes

Enya Fortuna

Curated by Skaiste Klaniute

 

45 minutes was a new performance piece that uses motion and repetitive actions to investigate how we understand time by recourse to analogy. Time has no material substance. As eloquently put by Jean Luc Nancy, it is “incalculable and untraceable by logic or measure”. Our pursuit to define or comprehend time ranges from inventing comparisons of measure (such as noting the passage of day to night, the seasons, to man-made mechanisms. In contemporary society, time is a cooperative commodity that is exploited in labour. We give our time to earn a living.

In 45 minutes Enya Fortuna responds to the instruction of occupying a defined time frame, yet she has no means of measuring time other than her own physicality and interaction with a set of objects and props. Water is poured by the performer whilst, simultaneously, ice melts slowly away elsewhere in the room, performing its own duration. Time is revealed as elastic and its experience as relative and individual, tainted by contrasting perceptions and actions, including those of the viewers.

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