Time Unwrapped: Out of Time: An exploration of connections between Musical and Visual Arts

Piano Nobile and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Collection are delighted to present Time Unwrapped: Out of Time, an exhibition exploring connections between the visual and musical arts, which for the first time at Kings Place explicitly links the exhibition in the gallery to the performances in the concert halls. The genre of self-portraiture raises particular questions that have bearing on the relation of art and time more generally. Self-portraits are at once the most human, revealing, and naked of art forms, yet also the most existential in directing attention to change, experience and life’s duration. Out of Time reflects on the genre of self-portraiture specifically in relation to Kings Place Music Foundation’s programme, Time Unwrapped, which considers the concept of time from its most experiential manifestations to its most intangible.

Self-portraiture presses the case for the temporality of art: it extracts a momentary view of the artist and their current environment; it looks simultaneously subjectively and objectively – or both inside oneself and at oneself from without. The more we examine the multiplicities of the genre, the more fragile any sense of something ‘fixed’ becomes. Far from being antithetical to the idea of musical duration, it is perhaps one of the best complements.

The discipline of reading self-portraits through the lens of Kings Place’s music programme offers the opportunity to re-interpret and play with the works of the Borchard Collection in unusual ways. The exhibition itself can be thought of as a performative, temporal act which offers a foil to central themes in Time Unwrapped: memory, suspension and reflection, alternate time, movement, cycles, premonition, and reincarnation. Take time with the works.

This exhibtion is presented in partnership with the Ruth Borchard Museum Partner for 2018 Art UK, and celebrates the 10th anniversary of the relationship between Piano Nobile, the Ruth Borchard Collection and Kings Place.

The programme is curated by Professor Simon Shaw-Miller, Chair of History of Art at Bristol University and author of Eye hEar: The Visual in Music and Visible Deeds of Music: Art & Music from Wagner to Cage, and Dr Charlotte de Mille, author on art and music, and music curator at The Courtauld Gallery.