Time Out of Joint at Frac Aquitaine Explores Disjointed Temporality

The exhibition 'Time Out of Joint' at Frac – Collection Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France, from May 16 to July 20, 2007, examines fractured temporal experiences. Curated by Claire Jacquet, who became director of the Frac in March 2007, the show takes its title from Philip K. Dick's novel, itself referencing Shakespeare's Hamlet. It features works by Dove Allouche, Ulla von Brandenburg, and Loïc Raguénès. Raguénès presents a large mural painting of a tanker, rendered in a photomechanical grid of monochrome dots that create an interplay of presence and absence, directly engaging the port context of the Frac's location. Von Brandenburg assembles diverse elements: a tent made of flags without specific location, a tableau from a silent 16mm film, a ribbon, and a game carpet titled 'The Tactician,' avoiding nostalgia by adapting historical resources to contemporary reality. Allouche's works include 'Mélanophila II,' dark compact drawings of a burned eucalyptus forest in Portugal; 'Le Temps scellé,' photographs taken twenty years later at the filming site of Tarkovsky's 'Stalker'; and 'Retours,' digitized borrowing records of contemporary poetry from the Sarcelles library. These pieces explore loss, transparency across time, and the vertigo of digitization, presenting time as accelerating, decelerating, and never fully resolved.