Yesterday Was November 18, Tomorrow Will Be Too

How fully do we inhabit the present? Too often, it appears only as a passage between what has been and what is yet to come, shaped by memory, anticipation and the expectation of progress. Beneath everyday sameness, slow changes continue to gather in bodies, materials and memories.

Drawing on the temporal structure of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, the exhibition takes November 18 as a model for a present no longer organised by linear progression. In the novel, the protagonist Tara Selter becomes detached from linear time and remains within the same date, which repeats without ever becoming identical. By holding a single day open through recurrence, the exhibition asks what becomes visible when forward movement is suspended.

Within this temporal framework, the nineteen artists enter the present through different material languages and experiences of memory, perception, the body and place. Across diverse media, repetition takes the form of mechanical movement and ritual gesture, layering and erosion, recurring images and motifs, and sustained acts of looking, listening and remembering, bringing subtle differences into view.

Across the gallery, attention moves inward and outward, between changes registered within the body and those unfolding across objects, environments and the lives of others. Arranged along these intersecting directions, the works bring memory, sensation and private experience into contact with material, social and ecological conditions.Visitors move through overlapping rhythms as each work changes how the next is encountered. Private experience becomes perceptible to others, and inhabiting the present together becomes an act of attention and responsibility.

Yesterday Was November 18, Tomorrow Will Be Too is a group exhibition featuring works by nineteen emerging artists, curated by Rusha Cheng and Zhuoran Fu, who work together as the independent curatorial collective Sensaflare(@sensaflare).