03.10.24 – 18.10.24, Pedram Kargar, What’s the time?

Pedram Kargar studied electronic engineer in Iran, but when he arrived in Belgium he opted for an additional artistic training as an animation filmmaker. Kargar migrates the medium-specific technical and conceptual parameters in his ‘animalogical’ installations, where he transforms the methodology of animation into spatial metaphors.

Unlike in live action cinema, the animator does not ‘capture’ actions with the camera in their real time duration. In animated film, the duration of time is composed frame by frame. The result is an illusory, synthetic time that is created and exists only through and within this medium. 

And thus Kargar visualises the summation of time units through an accumulation of clockworks. ‘As the clock ticks at home, it ticks nowhere else,’ reads a Flemish proverb. Kargar adopted a solid collection of wooden clocks that used to supply the interiors of as many conservative homesteads and supplemented these with alarm clocks of all kinds. The restless and noisy soundscape that Kargar orchestrates in n0dine creates an analogy for the noiseless ease that allows us to hop from time zone to time zone online, making the whole world seem at our fingertips all at once.

Pedram Kargar is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Behind the Curtains of Animation was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.