In this new year of the blue wood snake, the Moon is 3.78cm (or about 1.5”) farther away from us than when the Wandering Calendar began. The orbiting and wandering of stars remind us that time is a loosely descriptive language. The illusion of its rigidity is maintained by a global performance of counting and measuring, which at times gives way to the revelation of this imposed arbitrariness. The necessity of intercalation tells us that we exist between the artifice of orderliness and the exceptions to the rules that maintain the apparent repetition of cycles. And as our aging bodies seem to insist, the days, weeks, months, years, decades…. centuries…. millennia…. march relentlessly forward.

When we began to invite artists to contribute to this project, we wondered what the unit of time known as 2024 might hold and how we might respond to its unfolding. The past dozen lunar cycles have witnessed a blur of coordination, production, intervention, connection, choreography, display, and play, with six contributors working with us to realize their contributions from a distance. This required an engagement with reality based on trust and the willingness to respond to what might be possible, given that these works mainly inhabited public space in a spirit of anarchic and unsanctioned immediacy.

Abigail Raphael Collins’ UNREST posters called on our collective humanity, reflecting on the etymology of “Yisrael” as “God-wrestlers,” and were installed by Davenport & Parkdale Residents for Palestine, who helped paste them up by cover of night during Passover. Ashes Withyman’s posters combined the products and services of contemporary advertising with the anachronistic language of town criers and the physicality of letterpress printing. The symbolic agents within the Chinese characters –  間=門+日, the sunlight entering through the gap between doors – opened time’s in-betweenness and brought SF Ho to produce work while visiting us, using natural dye and a found-language poem. Erika Kobayashi’s bookmarks recorded the names of twenty-four plant species that previously thrived in the premises of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, connecting the microcosm of a printing district in Seoul (충무로) to Toronto via Art Metropole’s willingness to distribute her project. Logan Frances’ layered posters evoked advent calendars, disclosing fragmentary views of an image of a revolutionary uprising in counterpoint to the ubiquitous advertising pasted on scaffolding in Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood. Lastly, Jeanne Randolph humorously invoked the 90s craze for Pogs© – a collectible milk-cap-like trinket – sprinkling them in the consumer core of Toronto to deliver a message of finality: “CONVENIENCE IS DEATH.”

As time wears on, we get worn out by this ever-accelerating way of living that defines the present. As an undertaking, this project forced us to slow down and make time for the thoughts and visions of other artists, to support them in realizing their subtle interventions, and to trust wholeheartedly that these will continue to have ripple effects among the unknown passersby who may have been productively perplexed by encountering them.  We kept thinking about spirit throughout this year-long process – a spirit of resistance, playfulness, perseverance, responsibility, care, and life-affirming joy – and the necessity of all these spirited responses in light of all that 2024 contained.

We are grateful to the participating artists for doing so much with so little and to Brennan Kelly, who acted as location scout, installer and photo-documentarian for the majority of these works. None of this would have happened if it had not been for Kunstverein Toronto, who probably didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into when they solicited this project. 😁

HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander