Sára Bown Kasanová↓

About the work

In-between Time

I remember a time when I was about three to five years old, sometimes I would lie down on the floor and just be there. I was partially present with everything that was around me, such as the texture, color, and smell of the carpet on which my face was laid, the undersides of furniture touching the floor, or dust and dirt somewhere in the corner of the room. At the same time, I was present with my thoughts and reflection of how I was feeling at that moment. I was residing in my own world existing outside of time, and this state of being could be interrupted, for example, by my being addressed by an adult and snapped out of my fixed attention on my intimate surroundings. I return to what I was experiencing in these moments: pure presence, being.

In my work, I deal with the concept of timelessness, presence, and the notion of liminal spaces, denoting a space-time in which nothing happens. It is a time stretch between two points that is always filled with something, only the „something“ is often considered irrelevant or uninteresting. By these moments I mean, for example, waiting in line at the store, at the bus stop, or w aiting for things to start unfolding as I imagine them to. In such moments, it is easy to build up resistance and let the present moment slip by unnoticed. However, I find such moments interesting in their potential to become almost magical when we manage to let go and surrender to the present moment. I have experienced that it is then - in sheer being - that things begin to transform.

In my work, I explore and capture moments when time (or image) appears non-linear. I focus on the mundane, which I perceive through the simplest possible frameworks through which I better understand the world around me. I then make these frames available for viewing, often through durational photographs, and preferably in such a way that viewers can walk away from the screen and return to it again without missing anything.

While riding a tram in Petřiny district in Prague at the end of winter, I noticed a villa whose roof was being renovated. Its beams were covered with huge tarpaulins flapping in the wind. The sight of the tarpaulins made a strong impression on me and touched me in some way. In connection with this experience, I remembered an excerpt from the book How to Meditate by Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun: “At Gampo Abbey, there are flagpoles out on the cliffs above the ocean. We keep experimenting with putting flags out there, because that’s the point of flagpoles. Sometimes the weather is very calm, and we experience these lovely flags in the stillness of slight wind. Other times there are incredibly high winds, and the flags get shredded in a very short time. The image of the flagpole and the flag is a great one for working with thoughts and emotions, because the flagpole is steady and holds, and then the winds are whipping the flags all over the place, tearing them to shreds—that’s usually our predicament. We are the flags, and the wind is just whipping us around. We’re just whipped here and there and all over the place. And our emotions are escalating, our thoughts are all over the place. But using thoughts or emotions themselves as the object of meditation is experiencing life from the perspective of the flagpole. At Gampo Abbey, we never have to get new flagpoles. Even with hurricane-
velocity winds, the flagpoles stay up on the cliffs.” It is this experience of tarpaulins covering the roof and meditation through repeatedly returning to the present moment that I materialize through my project.