Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns (Riva degli Schiavoni), 2011. Photo © Katie Paterson, 2011.

Surrounded by 100 billion suns, it is nearly impossibility to not let feelings of insignificance take over – simply a minute speck standing within a vast universe. The macrocosmic nature of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s work cultivates these diminutive impressions – whether we are listening to the sounds of silence reflected off the moon, or looking far back into the universe to a place where the earth doesn’t exist, Paterson’s work constantly reminds us that we, as human beings on this particular planet, are an inconsequential part of a much larger whole.

The relatively small body of work that Paterson has made to date focuses on momentous themes of astronomy, geology, space and time. Blending artistic conceptualism with cold, hard scientific facts, Paterson makes the incomprehensible universe a bit more exoteric, whilst being engagingly poetic and austerely minimal.

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns, 2011, confetti cannon, 3261 pieces of paper. Photo © Katie Paterson, 2011.

Paterson’s latest exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London serves as a mini-retrospective of the artist’s projects to date, and the element of performance permeates all of her works – whether it be on an astronomical or human scale. In 100 Billion Suns, a project first developed and executed at the Venice Biennale, a confetti canon is discharged daily within the gallery space. The canon contains 3261 pieces of paper, each one carefully colour-matched to a corresponding gamma ray burst, the brightest of all galactic explosions, burning at the luminosity of 100 billion suns. Here, the artist turns this rarely occurring, and even more rarely seen, event into a daily ritual, peppered with celebratory and nostalgic allusions.

Katie Paterson, The Dying Star Letters, 2010, letters written on different stationary. Photo: Peter Mallet. © Katie Paterson.

As we know, and as the artist continually reminds us, nothing is static and the universe is constantly in flux. With the ongoing project, The Dying Star Letters, Paterson draws upon the equally dying art of the post to build a sentimental archive that records and laments the death of each star in the universe. Informed by electronic telegram when a star has met its demise, Paterson sits down, wherever she may be in the world, and writes a letter, informing its recipient of the tragic loss and humanising the immaterial.

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Katie Paterson, Black Firework, 2010, firework remains in a wooden display box. Photo: Peter Mallet. © Katie Paterson.

While much of Paterson’s work functions to make material the otherwise inaccessible, one project in particular relies solely on the imaginary. Like the oft-quoted adage, ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’, Paterson’s Black Firework begs the questions of what happens to a black firework set off in the darkest of night with no one around to see it. Specially manufactured, and lit under a cloak of secrecy, the black firework has no audience, no reference point, and no documentation, other than the residual relic that lies in a coffin in the gallery. However, it does ignite the active imagination as one tries to envision just what a black firework might look like, and how it might sound.

Katie Paterson, As the World Turns, 2011, adapted record player, motor, pre-amp, amp, headphones, plinth, vinyl record of Vivaldi’s four seasons. © Katie Paterson. Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy Haunch of Venison

Converting human time into a planetary scale, As the World Turns, slows down a record player to match the rotational rate of the earth on its axis. Both the movement of the record and the sound of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons become virtually imperceptible, as is the movement of the planet that we inhabit. Instead of converting the astronomical into tangible form, here the artist takes the familiar and stretches it to a cosmic scale, as it loses its recognisable meaning it the process.

Katie Paterson’s combination of the empirical and the imaginary makes us acutely aware of the rules of space and time that govern this universe. Familiar objects are made galactic in reference, and the astronomical is brought back down to earth. Whilst grounded in the conceptual and minimalist aesthetic, the work in this exhibition ignites our imaginations, and translates between the incomprehensible and that which we see, hear and feel.