We can no longer deny ourselves

2022

OPEN SEPTEMBER 23RD TO OCTBER 30TH 2022, 10AM - 6PM WITH DAILY PERFORMANCES 12-3PM

Unfolding across the interconnected spaces of the River Rooms, We can no longer deny ourselves explores systems that shape perceptions of time. The installation is conceived as an ‘exploded clock’ made up of several elements including sculptural objects, video and live performance, with immersive lighting and audio. 

We can no longer deny ourselves is an invitation to consider the material and psychic dimensions of time and how these are felt by our bodies. Creating a space for time’s expansion, contraction and diffusion, the exhibition is a reflection on relationships between time and labour, bodies and capitalism. The work explores how these interplays can lead us away from ourselves by working in opposition to the cycles of circadian rhythms, our grief, and to the celestial bodies that connect all beings to the earth’s movements and root systems. 

The exhibition responds to the features of the unrenovated and austere architecture of the River Rooms and the layers of difficult histories that live in its fabric. Refraining from covering or masking the building's truth, SERAFINE1369 works with subtle interventions that use and echo its existing materials and colours. 

Drawing attention to ways of looking, the first gallery contains a large water bowl and multi-channel video that traces features and close-ups of the exhibition spaces at different times of the day. They propose a moment of focus and reorientation as a way of arriving in the exhibition. It is the first of four gallery spaces housing a series of sculptures representing oscillators, idiophones and substances that have historically been used to measure and keep time: water, a pendulum, bells and quartz crystals. These hold ritualistic and spiritual associations of ablution, pendulum dowsing, church bells and crystal healing. Other objects distributed across the space also mark the passing of time, including an hourglass and a vase of lilies slowly decaying. 

Together the sculptures and objects speak to an experience and understanding of time as simultaneously ancient, evolving and fragmentary. The materials used by SERAFINE1369 also reflect their ongoing interest in an ethics of recycling and renewal; the concrete slabs were found within the building and many of the other materials, such as the string fabric and water bowl, have appeared in earlier works by the artist.  

We can no longer deny ourselves offers time as a tool of transcendence, opening up other dimensions or relations, as something non-linear, bodily, imaginary and spatial. You are invited to enter and spend time in the space as a place for reflection and feeling.

A free handout accompanies the exhibition and includes a new text by SERAFINE1369, a conversation between the artist and curator Rahila Haque, and original writing and poetry by Phoebe Collings-James, Harun Morrison and Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin. 

Commissioned by Somerset House