Julieta Aranda: You Had No 9th of May!

March 28 – April 27, 2008

Opening reception, Friday, March 28, 7 – 11 PM

Sala Diaz is pleased to present a new work by Julieta Aranda, organized in conjunction with guest-curator Regine Basha.

Aranda’s installation, You Had No 9th of May ! considers the arbitrariness of our construction of time and the scientific basis for time measurement and experience. As humans, do we move towards time ? or does time come towards us ? If time is nothing but a series of repetitions, as Borges would have it, or a ‘ a series of representation of a physical world where future, present and past become interlined figures of underexposure, exposure and overexposure’ as Paul Virilio would have it, than are we able to determine our own subjective format for time ? We readily assume our positions in time-space constructions (a 24 hr day for instance), though there is no global agreement of when today and tomorrow begin. The International Date Line, the central figure in Aranda’s site-specific installation, is an immaterial marker of today and tomorrow with no fixed location and no international law that proclaims its existence (though it is commonly identified on maps as being 180 degrees longitude from the meridian located in Greenwich, England). It does though, have one very important aberration – a detour at the series of Micronesian islands called Kiribati.

In 1995, the small archipelago of Kiribati located in the south pacific decided to move the International Date Line east to 150°, so that the entire country would then be situated on the western, “tomorrow,” side of the IDL (instead of remaining split between yesterday and tomorrow). Significant to Aranda’s interest in this account is how a country (such as Kiribati), which is often ignored in cartographic and political representation, managed to change the representation of this imaginary boundary. The IDL detour, bending forward a day and back across, accommodates Kiribati’s quirky local and geographic specificity, while affecting such things as space travel, global communication and world economies. One might recall the broadcast of the turning of the millennium beginning at that surprisingly tiny island no one knew about.

According to various articles (which Aranda collapses together in a specially designed newspaper called ‘NEWSTAR)’, the Kiribati phenomena has produced double Christmases, double New Years Days and double birthdays – such as consecutive twins born at sea while crossing the date-line producing one born on Jan. 1st and the next one on Dec. 31st. One article recounts how in 1973 Mission Control would have to have had wished its astronauts a “Happy New Year” 16 times during the course of one day while circling Kiribati.

Sala Diaz, an innocuous experimental gallery located in a residential neighborhood of San Antonio, will become the repository of material relating to Kiribati’s ownership of tomorrow. Aranda will materialize this anomaly of relative time with curious objects, the NEWSTAR newspapers, and a library of books exploring time constructions from Jules Verne, to Stansilav Lem, to Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Sala Diaz

517 Stieren

San Antonio, TX 78210

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