Timeline

“Physical geography is, so to speak, the history of humanity made visible.”
Elisée Reclus

Timeline is inspired by František Kupka’s illustrations for L’Homme et la Terre (Man and Earth) by Élisée Reclus (1905), which traced the history of humanity through its interactions with nature. He saw our planet as a living organism, and human societies as shaped by long-term forces. The French geographer and the Czech painter shared a worldview in which humanity is inseparable from its ecosystems – terrestrial, atmospheric, and cosmological – and where time unfolds not as a succession of events, but as a continuum of global transformations.

As climate change now makes us feel the reality of our entry into the Anthropocene, Reclus’s ideas, like the illustrations Kupka created for them, appear more contemporary than ever. Timeline is an exhibition that brings together 14 international artists around the drawings by Kupka, and around four notions drawn from the encounter between the artist and the geographer: the idea of a relational space (the world is made of active agents, not of inert matter), deep time (including natural and cosmic cycles), totalization (the desire to synthetize big data and abstract ideas, and a new animist spirit, inspired by 19th century symbolism.
Nicolas Bourriaud

Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.
With Barbara Lagie.

Essay by Markéta Theinhardt

Artists

František Kupka
Alex Červený
Bianca Argimón
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
Romain Bernini
Caroline Corbasson
Patrick Van Caeckenbergh
Bharti Kher
Verne Dawson
Patricia Domínguez
Katja Novitskova
Marguerite Humeau
Charles Avery
Suzanne Treister
Jura Shust