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. That’s the dizzyingly grandiose title of the current exhibition at the in Geneva, Switzerland.

It’s a moniker that implies an aeon-spanning blockbuster encompassing almost all of existence since the Big Bang: an immense stretch of time against which individuals, art movements, civilisations and geological epochs – the focus of your average exhibition – seem to pale in comparison.

However, it’s far from being a potted history of the cosmos. This thought-provoking show explores concepts of linear, quantum, and universal time through the combination of centuries-old timepieces and ambitious works of contemporary art, inviting viewers to reconsider the nature of spacetime and our highly relative experience of it.

The fourth dimension

Speaking to the show’s co-curator and MAH director Marc Olivier-Wahler over Zoom, he animatedly discussed the show’s evolution, philosophical inspirations, and its creative formulation, which productively unites items from the museum’s horological collection (sublimely-designed timepieces from the 16^th century to today) with works of contemporary art that offer an affectively engaging experience of the fourth dimension.

“Here we have one of the best watchmaking collections in the world”, Wahler effused. “So, it really started as an exhibition on horology and watchmaking…that was already decided when I came. Because Geneva is the place, ground zero of watchmaking.

“But it’s also the most important place for quantum physics. It’s where the particle accelerator is and all these experiments with neutrinos. So, I thought maybe we should do both.”

Merging horology, ideas of the quantum, and contemporary art, 10 Billion Years illustrates an intuitive and interdisciplinary approach characteristic of the curatorial style Wahler has cultivated over a 30-year career, and which fosters a tension between two seemingly contradictory notions of time: the standardised, mechanical time of clocks, as represented by the museum’s varied selection of timepieces, and quantum time.

While the word “quantum” could lead one to anticipate scores of impenetrable science, Wahler clarified that “we don’t really talk about quantum physics in the show. It’s more of a narrative element.” The concept as utilised here is, rather, something highly contextual, experiential and subjective, and it’s this definition that shores up the exhibition’s structuring dichotomy.

“Each time you make an observation in quantum physics it’s different as it’s based on the individual observer. You could repeat the same experiment each time [with different people] and the outcome would be different.”

“It’s basically the definition of art by ”, he affirmed – who is, coincidentally one of Wahler’s favorite artists – “who said that the observer is doing all the work of interpretation.”

It’s also the time of the individual artist because they “formalize an idea of time that is elastic”: forging its malleable nature in their work, and whose reception will change depending on the person observing it. Quantum time, then, seems to stand in stark contrast to the cold, uniform, mechanised time of pocket watches and clocks.

Combining multiple disciplines into one

As the title of Wahler’s five-volume art encyclopaedia From Yodelling to Quantum Physics makes abundantly clear, his approach to exhibition making combines divergent topics, objects, and disciplines, whose unusual union can help us understand the world in brand new ways.

“It’s like bringing two worlds together that will create a huge tension. Alicja Kwade’s work, for example, is in a room filled with pendulums. So, the room is filled with about 50 types of pendulums from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then you have this iPhone circling round a stone with an app showing all the planets that are around you in real time.

“And these pendulums are… especially in Europe, every family has one, you put it above the chimney, it’s very bourgeois. So, you have this thing always moving, scanning stars, and it creates this tension between intimate domestic space and vast galactic space.

“For me, what is interesting is the friction between two things that aren’t linked. Like popular culture and super high-tech culture. But when you look at it it’s a little bit like our museum here now. We have antiquities, vases, numismatic [coins], watchmaking and art. Things that are not really connected at first sight, but what connects them is the skill. And then the fact that whatever you do, if you want to do it right you have to be creative.”

10 Billion Years isn’t the first time Wahler has delved into the fourth dimension, although that’s not surprising given his abiding interest in philosophy and a CV that can boast over 400 exhibitions.

A precursor to 10 Billion Years

Back in 2006, Wahler kicked off his directorial tenure at the in Paris with Five Billion Years: a thematic precursor that likewise drew comparison between cosmology and the perceptual ambiguity of art. But, as Wahler elaborated, there are 16 years and multiple differences between the two shows.

“Palais de Tokyo was imagining what comes next, the future. So, it’s like five billion years until the sun explodes and then turns into something else and consumes the planet. Now we’re saying 10 billion years because…we have to deal in our museum with past, present, and future, not only present and future.”

That “past” is embodied here by a selection of items from the MAH’s world-class horological collection – made over the last five centuries and arguably as divinely detailed as the universe itself – as well as through the extended conceptual scope of the current title that references the anticipated lifespan – the birth and eventual death – of our sun.

Of the horological items on display, they include a pocket watch made between 1520 and 1530, a painted iron Gothic clock (1679), and a dainty watch ring made by a man amusingly named Marcel Constant Bastard.

Some of these items contain dualities of scale which are more strikingly obvious elsewhere: a bulky 19^th century micrometre that allows for pain-staking measurements down to 0.00033 of a millimetre, and a hand-cranked, gorgeously ornate Orrery that illustrates the cosmological choreography of our solar system over the days and months.

We’re presented with multiple examples of the breath-taking accuracy of scientific and engineering endeavour, such as the Electronic Master Clock System made by Patek Philippe for Cointrin Airport, able to measure time down to the femtosecond (a billionth of a millionth of a second). Yet, as the multimedia work of artists like Kwade, duo Brognon Rollin, and Gianni Motti attest, our individual perception of time can fluctuate wildly from person to person.

Time can manifest in many different ways, and Wahler delights in illuminating this ambiguity. He underscored this with an enlightening quote from the ancient theologian , who posed the question: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”

Time appears to be intuitively understood – inscribed in Earth’s seasons and life cycles – yet almost impossible to define in words. Augustine himself described it as being both a “creature of God” – having an objective existence prior to the birth of humanity – and a phenomenon intimately linked to human consciousness.

10 Billion Years replicates this dreamy dichotomy. “I always try to search for that feeling where you create a tension where you don’t have the answer, or maybe you have it on the tip of your tongue”, Wahler explained of his curatorial approach. “But the fact you never find the answer means the viewer has to look further.”

Works of intricate design, engineering, and modern art are displayed in provocative relation to one another, channelling seemingly contradictory notions of time and space. As a result, viewers navigating the exhibition can expect to alternatively perceive time distending and contracting, being paused or expanded.

Motti’s film (2005) is an excellent example of the relativity of time, in which we watch the artist walk the circumference of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

“It was done just before the particle accelerator was generated for the first time”, Wahler recalled. “[Motti] walked these 27 kilometres over five hours, the video being the entire duration of the walk. In comparison, the particles that are sent through these tunnels go round 11,000 times per second. So that’s lightspeed basically and he’s going at walking pace. And that creates this tension.”

In the time Motti has taken one trip round the collider, accelerated neutron particles have already lapped the artist about 200 million times. That creates a tremendous disparity between the plodding real-time of human experience and the speed of the collider’s subatomic phenomena.

Watching the film unfold, awareness of these vastly different yet co-existing realities engenders a feeling akin to standing on the shore of a beach as a wave strips the sand from under your feet and you observe the foamy surf quickly recede – a vertiginous, destabilising sensation.

The affective power of this sensorily engaging show is partly explained in the writing of Dirk van Weelden, whose reasoning in the essay echoes many of Wahler’s own sentiments: for example, about artists’ flair for manipulating perception.

Admittedly, the reception of an artwork will vary based on a complex agglomeration of individual physiology and psychological factors, so that the aesthetic impact will vary from person to person.

“Perception is a coproduction of senses and the brain” Weelden elaborates, “which means that feelings, memories, sounds and smells, habits, phobias and above all language influence what we see or think we see.”

How silence can represent time

Foregrounding the impact that sound has on our perception of time is 24H Silence (1974, 2020), created by the artist duo Brognon Rollin and situated in the stained-glass room at the end of the exhibition. This jukebox contains more than 160 one-minute-long minutes of “silence” recorded during commemorative events.

“There’s supposed to be one minute of silence for any commemoration”, Wahler explained. “For example, 50 years commemorating the Holocaust, or the funeral of George. W. Bush Snr., and all these things. So, each time you press it, just like if you wanted to listen to a song, you’ll listen to a minute of silence instead. It’s actually very loud in a way. Because you hear people coughing, or you’ll hear a bell…so it’s an attempt to formalize this minute of silence.”

“But,” Wahler continued, adding a fascinating disclaimer, “maybe silence doesn’t exist.” Despite occurring over 13.8 billion years ago, he noted that “scientists claim they’ve been able to capture the sound of the Big Bang. There was of course an explosion, and they think it remained within the universe and they were able to capture this humming. So, there must be some sound in the universe! It’s like what is visible to human perception…it’s a very small part of the lumen spectrum.”

It’s this discursive insight and curiosity that enlivens an exhibition devised by Wahler, made possible by his thrilling knack for bringing together hugely divergent topics and disciplines. In the case of 10 Billion Years, that means combining impeccably-crafted objects from the museum’s horology collection with the work of contemporary artists: challenging fixed definitions of what constitutes “art” by their idiosyncratic union and deconstructing cultural value judgements.

Of the institutional model of the museum, and as current director of the MAH, he’s highly aware of the need to shake up inherited and outdated frameworks: “[Museums] can be very authoritarian, very intimidating,” he said. “They create hierarchy between mediums. Even in our museum, you start with archaeology and then it’s like applied art, and then you go to the top floor and it’s fine art.

“I think it tells you a lot about the society in which this hierarchy was created in the 19th century. But of course, now we’re in the 21^st century we have to re-think this type of hierarchy and it’s incredibly difficult.”

Wahler namechecks and , two speculative philosophers whose desire to move towards an ontologically flat, non-hierarchical world reflects his own. “Everyone should be seen on the same non-hierarchic level,” he stated. “We all want that, but we don’t know how to think this world without hierarchy. And I think a museum has a mission nowadays to help you think a world, an ontologically flat world.”

10 Billion Years
Museum of Art and History, Geneva
Exhibition ends 30 October 2022