Timelessness

25.06. until 20.08.2017
Kunstverein (Art association) Ellwangen e.V. Schloss ob Ellwangen Residenz (with Gerd Kanz)

The title of the exhibition is “timelessness”- what a wonderful word. The German is: “Zeitlosigkeit”.
With the annex and connex alone, it becomes a complicated and cumbersome word construction in
our language, and one can immediately understand why the curator of the exhibition, Silke Schwab-
Krüger, chose the English language. It is not without reason that the concept of time is much more difficult to grasp in German, since we completely lack the verb “to time”, as in English. However, we Germans have an important book by Martin Heidegger from 1927 as a cultural asset on the aspect of time: “Sein und Zeit” – “Being and Time”. The philosopher Rüdiger Safranski and Heidegger biographer summarizes the main thesis of “Being and Time”, the standard reference on this philosophical topic still valid today, as follows: “When asked why people are so absorbed in what they do, they subliminally feel that their great antagonist is time: They aim for the durability of being because they cannot stand the challenge of time.” 1
Do we want to escape into timelessness because we cannot stand the challenge of time? …

Excerpt of the opening speech of Dr. Hannelore Paflik-Huber, Art Historian