exhibition Time Takes a Cigarette, on show at Espaço MIRA.
In dialogue with the public, they will discuss the exhibition's production process and situate this immersive video installation in the body of work of Aya Koretzky.

The talk will take place on 19 October at 5pm at Espaço MIRA.


About the exhibition:
Time Takes a Cigarette, an immersive video installation by Aya Koretzky, takes as its starting point the short film of the same name made by the filmmaker in 2023. The title takes a verse from the first verse of the song Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide, from the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, released by David Bowie in 1972: Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth / You pull on your finger / Then another finger, then cigarette / The wall-to-wall is calling / It lingers, then you forget. If the title evokes a specific historical and cultural context - the European music scene of the 1970s, which is analysed here from the perspective of the city of Porto - the quotation of the stanza from Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide immediately introduces certain conceptual assumptions of the installation, which are expressed in its forms and structures. The work is doubly concerned with reconstitution as a means of representing history and memory, putting the past and the present in tension. In other words, if, on an internal, narrative level, Time Takes a Cigarette reconstructs fleeting moments from Porto's punk scene of the 1970s and 1980s in the present, photographically recorded snapshots of a past time, the structure and exhibition elements recreate the atmosphere of the nightclubs of that historical period, offering the viewer a phenomenological and performative experience.
Set against the background of the great transformations in Portuguese society that took place after the 1974-1975 Revolution, Time Takes a Cigarette opposes any static conception of history. On the contrary, it works from a principle of transit and impermanence, which translates into the visitor moving around the exhibition space, looking not for traces in the present, but for updates of the past. In this way, the installation not only inscribes the history of Porto's youth counterculture in the space of representation, but also scrutinises and inventories its parallels and current declinations.
(Raquel Schefer)