Making Time

Artangel, London, UK, 2023

• Project Information
• Publication: Making Time: Volume One
• In Conversation: Making Time Year One Artists and Mariam Zulfiqar
• Tapping Performance

Project Information

Making Time is an 18 month-long programme that supports artists as they reflect on their own practice amidst an ever-growing awareness of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. The programme is currently in its second iteration.

Participating artists are supported by a network of gallery and academic partners, each offering unique skills, facilities, and expertise to further develop their ideas for new material possibilities, environmental sustainability, and behavioural change.

The emergence of new ideas arising from encounters and conversations between university research and artistic practice highlights the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration at this time of changing climate and intersecting crises. 

Partners for the second year of the Making Time programme are Science Gallery London at King’s College London, Radar at Loughborough University, Mead Gallery and Warwick Institute of Engagement at University of Warwick, and Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University.

The partners for the first year of the Making Time programme were Science Gallery London at King’s College London, Brighton CCA at the University of Brighton and Radar at Loughborough University.

Publication: Making Time: Volume One 

Making Time: Volume One was produced to capture the development of ideas put forward by the artist participants of the first iteration of the Making Time programme.

Published in a limited print run in Summer 2024, the publication features contributions from each of the participating artists, a foreword by Mariam Zulfiqar and Jennifer Wong, and ‘Unlearning with Materials’ an essay by Ros Gray and Jol Thoms, leaders of the MA Art & Ecology programme at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A digital version of the publication is available as a free download. Click below to receive a link to your inbox where you can view or download the digital publication. 

Receive a free digital copy of Making Time: Volume One here

In Conversation: Making Time Year One Artists and Mariam Zulfiqar

To celebrate the publication launch of Making Time: Volume One at Science Gallery London, Mariam Zulfiqar Director of Artangel was joined in conversation by participating artists, Francisco Gallardo of FRAUD, Rachel Pimm and Abbas Zahedi to discuss their experience of the pilot year of the project and the necessity of integrative knowledge and collaboration between artists, galleries and academic partners in developing new material possibilities when confronting the climate crisis. Making Time is a year-long programme that supports artists as they reflect on their own practice amidst an ever-growing awareness of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. It offers a complimentary, artist-led approach to helping organisations monitor and track their climate impact.

Tapping Performance

In his site-specific Tapping Performance, Zahedi uses contact microphones and non-electric instruments to induce a state of active listening in viewers. While walking about a specific space, the performance sees Zahedi position a contact microphone – notably connected to a speaker attached to his body – on one aspect of the architectural environment – walls, windows, screens, other artworks, etc. Once affixed to a structure, Zaheid proceeds to tap this object, attentively listening to the reverberations picked up through the contact mic. In this way, Tapping Performance transforms an otherwise known space into a percussive instrument, accentuating how spaces talk to bodies (talk at bodies), dictating their movements – who can enter and who cannot.

Tapping Performance furthers Zahedi’s critical interest in the biopolitics of space – how spaces, physical and/or psychological, divide bodies, marring access. This spatial politics operates quietly, with those who are allowed into a space often not aware of the structural forces blocking entry for bodies deemed other. With this in mind, Tapping Performance draws attention to the forces that lie hidden beneath the façade of common-sense things. The work demands we listen carefully to our surroundings.

Further information about Making Time can be found on Artangel’s website _^source