What Times Are These?

How might an artist puncture a culture of silence? When political debates are fraught, might saying less allow one to say more? The works gathered together for this exhibition find poetic ways to probe the histories and state of this nation, without asserting a fixed political view.

The title is borrowed from the Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan. After his family were killed in the Holocaust, he moved to Paris but continued to write in German, developing a surreal, enigmatic voice that circles around the question of how to broach the unspeakable.

The works presented here resonate with some of the concerns at the heart of Celan’s work: when do we have a political responsibility to speak—and how might we do so in a way that engages rather than inflames our adversaries? In his 1971 poem, ”A Leaf, Treeless,” he put the dilemma frankly:

What times are these
when a conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes
so much being spoken.

Some of the artworks on view have loud audio components. Noise-canceling headphones are available by request at our coat check.