Time is Out of Joint

With the opening of the Time is Out of Joint exhibition, inaugurated on 10 October 2016, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art is writing a new chapter in its history, completing a vast process of transformation through the reorganization of spaces and reinterpretation of its collections.

The interventions on the building, an integral part of the exhibition project, brought to light the structural plan of Cesare Bazzani of 1911, with the original brightness of the rooms in a continuous vision and in contiguity with the gardens and courtyards returned to visitors again.

The exhibition, a project by Cristiana Collu in collaboration with Saretto Cincinelli and the Scientific Technical College, unfolds and inhabits the interior and exterior space, counting about 500 works including loans from public museums and private collections.

Time is Out of Joint, whose title quotes the verses from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, probes the elasticity of the concept of time , a non-linear but stratified time, which seems to put into action the dilemma of the art historian Hans Belting “The end of the history of art or the freedom of art”. It is, therefore, the definitive abandonment of any historical linearity, for a vision that unfolds, on a synchronic level, the works as sediments of the long life of the museum.

"Time is Out of Joint" brings into play a heterodoxy, a disobedience, a subversion so natural that Jabes could be defined as "one of the privileged moments in which our precarious equilibrium is re-established" and a beginning is configured. A source point and a persistence that puts out any chronological certainty and puts into play a plastic temporality that behaves like the Higgs boson , therefore depends on our gaze. And with a real montage, with the partiality that every choice and every selection brings with it, precipitates historical chronological time, anachronizes past, present and future, reconstructs and makes another time decant, while highlighting intervals and durations , shooting and setbacks. A time full of faults, fractures, voids, scraps and shots, which suggests many combinations such as those that Time, without hesitation, exposes in full light. We move in the space through the rooms and the works, where the images are fixed, in simultaneous relationship with each other, as if they were prequels and sequels together : a cinema on the contrary, where "photography", vision plays a key role in crystallizing and hold back such fertile tensions even in their composed presence. Time unfolds a cinematic time, a story, a flow of memory, an anticipation of what is to come and tries to resemble us more than a history of art book does. "

Cristiana Collu

[Director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art]