No Linear Fucking Time is an exhibition with gatherings, an online publication, and a symposium that unsettle dominant temporalities and model alternate forms of livable time.

The project aims to apprehend the Western conception of time as what artist and activist Rasheeda Phillips calls “temporal oppression,” which as a tool of colonization, exploitation, and social flattening forecloses present-day equities for a range of cultures. It then seeks look within multidisciplinary nonlinear conceptions of time scales and flows for ways of redirecting present cycles of crises, and imagining communities otherwise, in ways that involve caring for ancestors and learning from cyclical, imperceptible, and broad timescales in order to readdress local and global ecologies. The project posits that just as time has been a colonizing and homogenizing force, rethinking time is a key function of anti-colonial movement. Furthermore, when time is seen not as abstract but the unfolding of shifting relations—among living and dead humans, plants, animals, and minerals, and multiple interactions across them—critical sensitivities can be honed towards other avenues of the possible.

The exhibition will be on view at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, until May 22th, 2022.