03:40 HOW HAVE YOU BEEN / ZIWU
–
Opening Times 10am - 6pm
London and Pennsylvania-based artist Ziwu’s solo exhibition 03:40 How Have You Been articulates a practice profoundly attuned to the temporal, positioning time not merely as subject but as a generative condition for making, unmaking, and remaking. Through deliberate narrative ruptures and the recursive gesture of re-editing, the artist mobilises what might be called a post-narrative poetics — an exploration of memory, temporality, and the indexical trace as they oscillate between observation and being observed. The works suggest formal seriality and modular precision, yet upon closer inspection they disclose a field of différance: each component contains its own micro-contingencies, a refusal of total repetition.
Central to the exhibition is Cesura, a meditation on the materiality of analogue photography and the instability of its claim to representation. Negatives are subjected to relentless cutting, splicing, and reordering until their narrative function is displaced. What emerges is a grid that oscillates between order and fracture — a visual regime that at a distance promises legibility, yet on approach is undermined by its own gaps, deviations, and the aleatory nature of filmic process. Cesura thus stages a tension between indexicality and constructedness, inviting viewers to question whether the photographic grid offers an “objective” panorama or a curated fiction, a simulation of continuity stitched from fragments.
The exhibition also features Still Writer, a multi-screen installation and AI-mediated scanning project that unfolds as a durational feedback loop. Trained on the movement of water, its blocks respond unpredictably, producing a choreography of reaction whose own record becomes material for subsequent cycles of response — a meta-archive of its own becoming. The work resonates with Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, echoing mechanisms of industrial governance: audit trails, milestone reviews, recursive oversight structures that both discipline and are themselves disciplined. Within this assemblage, the block operates as more than a mere object; it becomes an epistemic site, charged with the tensions of industrial migration, transience, and reterritorialisation, its digital present haunted by the concrete solidity of its former material state.
Taken together, 03:40 How Have You Been constitutes an inquiry into the porous thresholds between object and subject, narrative and simulation, standardisation and contingency. Ziwu’s work does not merely present images but theorises the conditions of their legibility, insisting on the persistence of difference as a counterpoint to the homogenising impulse of the grid. What emerges is less a resolution than a provocation — an invitation to read time’s fractures and residues as a silent salutation, an untranslatable greeting left by history, geography, and use.