Time Travelers

“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
– William Faulkner

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” states the opening line of a 1953 novel by English author L.P. Hartley. This sentence acknowledges the complexity and nuance of historic events and warns against nostalgia in the face of unreliable memory. William Faulkner’s similarly famous line, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” seems to argue the opposite case, contending that history is always with us. The artists in Time Travelers create work that explores these two philosophical views and the various points in between. Beyond exploring folklore, history, and cultural products of bygone eras, the artists here reimagine elements of the past by employing craft techniques, borrowing antique objects and materials, and reclaiming ancient narratives.

This exhibition is grounded in two ambitious, large-scale installations, both part of the Art Center’s permanent collections: Mika Rottenberg’s Cheese and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Boat People. Constructed from what appears to be old barn wood and small television monitors, Cheese takes inspiration from the real-life Sutherland sisters, who built a successful career on the basis of their long hair. Using surrealism and off-kilter humor, Rottenberg transforms the sisters into fairy tale maidens, creating literal food from their famous hair. While highlighting individuals whose unusual lives are mostly forgotten, Rottenberg’s vision highlights the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, a topic that remains relevant today.

Nguyen’s The Boat People places its characters in the future rather than the past. It is a cinematic, episodic film in which a group of children collect relics from a post-apocalyptic world, trying to decipher events from an almost-lost history. The children’s existential and ritualistic approach to the objects they find is poetic and poignant. Viewers, residents of the past these children explore, will recognize evidence of the all too real tragedies the fictional children can only guess at.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn (Vietnamese, born 1976)
The Boat People (film still), 2020
Single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, color, 5.1 surround sound
Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased with funds from the Pamela Bass-Bookey and Harry Bookey Video Acquisition Fund and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc., 2023.32
Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York