Jonathan Joosten’s artistic practice can beread as resistance to chrononormativity, to the linear structuring of time as it is linked to capitalist productivity and historical continuity. Joosten works with residual or fragmented materials: industrial prototypes, discarded architectural elements, forms that have become obsolete. These are materials that have fallen out of their temporal grid, not yet waste, no longer functional, but caught in a state of limbo. Instead of imposing a logic of progress or completion on these objects, Joosten emphasises incompleteness, delay and repetition.
This defies the values of clarity and linear narration and invites the viewer to dwell in temporal ambiguity. Joosten’s works suggest an ongoing becoming, a refusal to settle into past or future, memory or vision. The artist thus creates a space for a temporal drag - a reverberation of the past in the present. This form of temporal irritation can be read as both a material and conceptual interruption. What happens when time gets out of sync? When materials, memories and narratives lose their intended place in cultural, industrial or emotional systems? And instead take on alternative rhythms?
His practice thus ties in with author Elizabeth Freeman’s call in Time Binds (2010) to inhabit time in alternative, resistant ways. Neither quite past nor already future: Joosten collects the unclaimed, the half-forgotten, the speculatively remaining.
We find ourselves in the archive of the not-yet.
- Emily Pretzsch
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