On Kawara

In connection with the exhibition Full of Days celebrating Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s 140-year anniversary, you can take part in- or experience On Kawara’s monumental performance piece One Million Years: Past and Future.

On Kawara’s One Million Years: Past and Future consists of 20 volumes containing columns of years dated between 998,031 B.C. to year 1,001,992. Future was produced during 1970-1971 and Past from 1980 to 1998. The piece has since 1993 visited more than 42 art galleries and museums internationally.

The performances consist of volunteers reading in pairs, and each performance continues where the previous left off. The work moves slowly towards the present and into the future in an attempt to complete the reading of all twenty volumes. The readings are done in English and last for half an hour per pairing. With the permission of the volunteers, parts of the readings will be sound-recorded and sent to the One Million Years Foundation as documentation of the performance.

The readings take place at Kunsthal Charlottenborg on the following dates:

1 October 12.00 – 16.00 (BC)

1 November 17.00 – 20.00 (AD)

6 December 17.00 – 20.00 (BC)

14 January 12.00 – 16.00 (AD)

We are looking for volunteers for all dates. Feel free to contact booking@kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk if you wish to participate. Please add which days you wish to read. Readings must take place in pairs with a masculine-identifying person and a feminine-identifying person. Non-binary people choose themselves which part of the reading, they want to do.

On Kawara (1932-2016) is a Japanese conceptual artist who worked internationally – especially in Paris and New York. Kawara’s works are often based on the documentation of time and the function of time in human existence. He is particularly known for his date paintings from 1966-2013 in which he continuously painted the specific place, time and date of the day as an attempt to encapsulate the fleeting and paradoxical existence of time. One Million Years: Past and Future is also a conceptual attempt to make us aware of two central elements in human life: our place in the world and the passage of time.