Chasing Time | Hila Laiser Beja
"The exhibition Chasing Time was born out of the pain of these times. However, it does not remain a personal work; instead, it unfolds as a collective space where time is not only a philosophical category but also a mechanism of power. It suggests a space where chronological order dissolves, and the viewer is encouraged to experience the present not as a fixed point, but as a sliding surface —a space of delay, pause, and perhaps even resistance.
The central video work, which features a marginal figure of a half-naked man moving in repetitive motions under the scorching sun in a burnt-out urban empty lot, serves as a critical site, exposing the body as a focal point where time intersects with the political. The figure does not function as a protagonist, but rather as a "living testimony" to a situation in which social order has pushed it out. This is a manifestation of what Giorgio Agamben called "bare life" (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1995) – a life that politics has recognized only in the biological sense, a life devoid of rights other than survival itself.
Next to it, a small video work features a red fish-shaped helium balloon entangled in a treetop, suspended between heaven and earth. It embodies the ambivalence of the present: it refuses to fall but is not free to fly. The background sounds of children playing (with occasional piercing screams) add a chilling element to the otherwise normal picture. Here, time is a mechanism of both inclusion and exclusion – a visual realization of what Gilles Deleuze called "the time-image" (Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, 1985). In contrast to the " movement-image" that characterized earlier films, the "time-image" focuses on hidden movement, blurred perspectives, and camera autonomy, expressing a complex, postmodern reality in which the past, present, and future intermingle, creating a multiplicity of temporalities, much like the image of a labyrinth.
The amorphous sculptural object, which serves as a kind of "home" for the image of the balloon, which is reminiscent of Dali's melting clocks, acts as a paraphrase of capitalist time - industrial time that has been privatized and recalibrated to engender productivity. Here, time flows, escapes, refuses to obey. The three sculptures, made of rusted steel, operate in the space between painting and sculpture—they are a kind of linear axis of violent but abstract history. They are a cumulative collection of traces: they do not document but rather present the scars of history, the collective trauma engraved in metal, in rust, in memory, in the body.
A small sculpture shaped like a brain stem, printed life-size in polymer material, originally refers to a family medical story but also offers an introspective dimension: it reminds us that time is not only political and social but also neurological and physiological—that control mechanisms also operate through consciousness, through the filtering of experience, and how we experience sequence.
Chasing Time is thus a seemingly personal exhibition, but political in the broadest sense: it reveals how time itself becomes a field of struggle – between visibility and disappearance, history and memory, documented and invisible life. It requests that the viewer not only experience time but also ask who sets its pace, who is left behind, and who succeeds in surviving the race."
Yair Barak
Exhibition Curator
Tel Aviv, October 2025
