Copenhagen Contemporary was delighted to bring Swiss-American artist and composer Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) to Scandinavia for the first time, when it was shown a Papirøen in the summer of 2017. This video installation is recognised as a contemporary masterpiece and won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

The Clock is a 24-hour montage comprising thousands of scenes from film and television that feature everything from wristwatches to clocktowers, from buzzing alarms to the cuckoo clock – along with other references to the time. With The Clock, Marclay deconstructs and challenges the narratives of individual scenes by removing them from their original context and inserting them into another, where time itself becomes the protagonist. Synchronised with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities. At the same time, our natural, established perception of time is tested and challenged by the work’s many different narratives, which have no beginning or end.

During the show CC presented six special 24-hour screenings of The Clock, where audiences could experience the work in its entirety, covering the full span of a day and night.

The Clock first premiered in London in 2010 and has since been exhibited worldwide in more than twenty venues, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); and Guggenheim Bilbao (2014).

For more than thirty years, Christian Marclay has been exploring the connections between the visual and the audible, creating works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, photography, collage, music, and performance. A pioneering DJ using records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, since 1979 Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Okkyung Lee, Mats Gustafsson, and Lee Ranaldo. Marclay’s work has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide. International solo exhibitions include the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (2015); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva (2008); Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2003); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); Kunsthaus Zürich (1997); Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (1995); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1990).

Statens Kunstfond