Time After Time, Duo exhibition
21.05.2021 - 05.06.2021

Yongshen Deng and Masatoshi Noguchi

Excerpt from ``Next Time Might Be Your Time ́ ́
by ``Blue ́ ́ Gene Tyranny
Dear companion
We could be in Arizona or France
What will the world be like, when we see each other clear of all
circumstance?
What difference does it make?
Why don‘t you take a break
From whatever puts the pressure on you?
Oh listen
Can you go back to before you were born?
To the smiling place
Where having to stay who you are day after day
There must have been a light
Before the stories took away your fight
Were not attached or separate in space
You know the next time might be your time
For love and honor
To take the bother just to see this thing through
Is that what friends are here for?

I’m no longer afraid of nightmares and thunder. I used to when I was little but from a certain point of my life, they started to become comforting and sweet. Thunder puts me into a cosy sleep. Nothing is more sweet and comforting, when you wake up from a vivid nightmare and realize it was all a dream, and it turns the ground of reality into a sweeter embrace. I’m also no longer stimulated by horror movies much. But there remains one nightmare, it has recurred a few times, usually while I was sick with a fever, so my mind was delirious and I would often wake up screaming. To this date I’m not sure the description I’ve been offering repeatedly is accurate, but it is as follows: I’m suspended on a gigantic spider net, and an enormous airplan is going to crush on me. Think of a real spider net against a real-scale plane. Meanwhile, I’m the pilot inside the plane, trying not to crash. It is a specifi tension of an extreme leverage, a tiny unit against a gigantic scale, so gran that simply to conceive or to comprehend such a scale pushes you to self-obliteration and dissolution. A nightmare phenomenology where understanding becomes disappearing. It’s equivalent to trying to pick up a table with a tiny 5mm2 corner. Or like looking at a fossil and contemplating the actual time of bone turning into rock.

It’s like looking at a stalactite and observing the exact process of its formation. It’s like being asked to move faster than the speed of light.

Accompanied by Ildikó Schwab, Lena Stewens, Malte Möller, Marina Köstel and David Bachmann
Text by Yongshen Deng and Masatoshi Noguchi
Photos by Jakob Otter