Variable Time

„Variable Time” brings together three video programs developed in Tajikistan (2013), Mongolia (2018), and Moldova (2024). Rather than approaching video as documentation or commentary, the exhibition frames moving image practices as a form of forecasting. These are not predictions of what is to come, but attentive readings of the present: images that register shifts, repetitions, and tensions as they unfold in everyday life.

The exhibition treats temporal difference as a shared condition. In Dushanbe, artists revisit the figure of the “new man” to question how civic engagement and participatory practices have shifted since independence, and what remains of earlier ideals in everyday life. In Ulaanbaatar, tensions between nomadic and settled cultures expose the frictions produced by migration, urbanisation, and economic pressure. In Chisinau, young artists reflect on how to make art in dark times, looking both to the present experience of war and trauma and to earlier artistic responses to crisis.

Two of the programs were part of the 2025 edition of Videomaraton titled “The Edge of Light. Horizons of Resistance in Film & Video”, sharing its focus on resistance as a practice rooted in care, persistence, and witnessing. Seen together, the works trace a landscape of variable time, where artistic practice becomes a way of staying attentive to social realities that are still forming, where art does not offer resolution, but sustains the capacity to think, to respond, and to stay engaged within unresolved social realities.

More about the screening program and exhibition →