Julieta Aranda I Have Lost Confidence, 2005 via www.edwardmitterrand.com

This Wednesday, the Guggenheim hosts a conversation with Julieta Aranda, whose multi-part installation 'activates the museum's triangular staircase.' Included is an oversize clock that the divides the day into 10 hours, each composed of 100 minutes, each of which is similarly broken up into 100 seconds; a system briefly imposed in the zeal for rationality following the French Revolution, with one further modification. The 100 second interval is determined by the artist's own pulse rate. In this way, Aranda draw attention to the way our mood and state of mind influence our perception of the passing of time. Aranda has also used phosphorescent paint to copy quotations about time from more than two millennia worth of sources, words which only become visible at specific moments when the lights dim.

Aranda has long been concerned with the construction of time. Her work You Have No Ninth of May! concerned the International Date Line, which used to bend around a small island nation of Kirbati, that is until Kirbati decided to switch from being the end of one day to the beginning of the next. Aranda created an archive of objects and relics documenting this switch, investigating how the social construction of time allowed for an otherwise impoverished nation to claim worldwide agency.

Agency too, has been a consistent theme in her work, most notably in two collaborations with Anton Vidokle, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, each of which made interventions into circulation of cultural capital. The talk starts at 6:30.