Time of the Empress, 2012

Aziz + Cucher - New York City, USA

New Media Installation

A series of images from Time of the Empress are projected in a large scale onto facades of a building. For this particular presentation, the images will be rendered as white lines over a black background, negative images of the images originally created for previous iterations of the work.

Time of The Empress makes use of images of modernist buildings suspended in loops of simultaneous construction and disintegration to cast a meditational glance at historical cycles of growth and decay, destruction and renewal, implying the fragility of the present.

The title of the work refers to a passage at the end of Margarite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) where the Emperor, nearing death, reflects on the nature of time and the impermanence of empires.

Anthony Aziz (b. Massachusetts) and Sammy Cucher (b. Lima, Peru) have been been living and working together since 1991. 

Aziz+Cucher have exhibited their work in major museums and institutions with exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the Venice Biennale, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, National Gallery in Berlin and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

They are both members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York. They are based in Brooklyn.

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Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)

252 Bloor Street West (Best viewed from across the street, on Bloor Street and Devonshire Place, next to Varsity Stadium.)

This project is outdoors.