Page 75 - World of Art Contemporary Art magazine: The 2023 Guggenheim issue

Work in progress by Sarah Sze, 2022. © Sarah Sze.
Photo: Courtesy Sarah Sze Studio

commission, her works possess a generative quality - as or astronomical clocks around the world - the museum
though in a cycle of growth and decay - and dynamically building will become a site to explore the idea of a public
engage with the spaces they occupy. clock, and an experiment in collective timekeeping that all in
the city can experience.”
Visitors and passersby will first encounter Sarah Sze:
Timelapse outside the museum where the presentation Inside the museum, quiet gestures, such as a single
spills into the public sphere. At street level an uninterrupted pendulum hovering above the fountain on the rotunda floor
flow of images trace the contours of the building’s exterior, and a small sculptural installation tucked into an interstitial
while a projection on the rotunda’s circular facade mirrors space in front of the freight elevator, demonstrate Sze’s
in real time the cycle of the moon over the course of the distinct engagement with unexpected spaces. As visitors
exhibition. In Sze’s reimagination, the Guggenheim’s iconic, ascend to the sixth, uppermost level of the rotunda, they
UNESCO World Heritage architecture becomes a public enter an immersive environment: a panoramic sequence of
timekeeper in a reminder that timelines are built through eight bays occupied by a new series of works comprising
shared experience and memory. In the words of the artist, painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and sound.
“Like the collective efforts used by humans over centuries to
communally mark time, to measure and mark it in physical These are connected by a river of videos—seen earlier on
form - ranging from Jantar Mantar, to the Prime Meridian the building’s street-level façade – which slowly travels
line, to ubiquitous minarets, clock towers, and animated up the spiral expanse of the building’s interior, creating a

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