Four Dilations

This fall, MoMA PS1 presents Four Dilations, an exhibition that counters the dominant ways in which time is kept today. On view October 23, 2025, through March 2, 2026, the exhibition thematizes temporal dilation, a physical phenomenon that describes how observers with distinct frames of reference experience the passing of time differently. The presentation includes sculpture, performance, and installation works that are developed from time-based practices, such as dance, filmmaking, and sonic composition. Four Dilations features durational and spatial works by an international group of artists who came of age under the new regime of digital time management, each making their New York museum debut: New York-based duo Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter (b. 1987, Wetzikon; b. 1991, Zurich), New York-based Nandi Loaf (b. 1991, New York), Berlin-based Richard Sides (b. 1985, Rotherham), and Oslo-based Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru). Reconsidering the concept of “now” in the twenty-first century, their works use techniques of distortion, recursion, and elongation. Four Dilations expands on art historian Pamela M. Lee’s notion of “chronophobia” as the anxiety felt by artists in the 1960s affected by the existential crises of the nascent information age.

Under contemporary social and economic conditions that privilege expediency and rapid dissemination, the conceptual positions in Four Dilations reveal the politics of timekeeping as observer-dependent. Four colorful Machines by Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter are assembled from calculator and camera parts as well as deconstructed “movements”: the various springs, gears, pulleys, teeth, wheel trains, and levers that drive a clock’s internal mechanism. Rewired and reprogrammed to oscillate with recalcitrance—friction and drag added via felt, fishing line, and rubberbands—Graf and Grüter’s kinetic sculptures work steadily to non-productive ends. Nandi Loaf’s performative sculptures often function as placeholders for the artist’s withdrawal from systems that run on economies of attention, intentionally stuttering a more fluid circulation. Newly configured for PS1, her functioning DIY server farm— powered by USB Bitcoin Miners—demonstrates the dystopian gamble of institutional entities on short-term gains and promising individual capital via extended metaphor. In Richard Sides’s longform multichannel audio work, Deep Listening (2024), transducer speakers transform an entire gallery space into a resonant chamber. Using purpose-built synthesizers to produce a spatial and temporal environment with no fixed “viewpoint,” the audio composition combines recent field recordings with the artist’s own original music and appropriated material, arranged and edited for the PS1 galleries. In a performance presented during the run of the exhibition, three New York-based performers will realize Nikhil Vettukattil’s Timepiece (2022). Taking place in a setting illuminated by natural light as the sun goes down, the liminal work builds and diffuses around the performers’ collaborative tasks, with a soundtrack by Stanislav Iordanov. Four Dilations considers the dilemma of time measurement when extreme datafication, prompt response, and doomscrolling divest the individual subject of agency. With distinct approaches to time as a material and formal structure, Graf and Grüter, Loaf, Sides, and Vettukattil use strategies of movement and collaboration to build alternate temporalities within daily life.

Organized by Kari Rittenbach, Assistant Curator.