Julieta Aranda

In You had no ninth of May! (2006), Aranda addresses the artificiality of the homogeneous construction of time through the case of Kiribati, an archipelago in the Pacific that, in 1995, changed the position of the International Date Line (IDL). Through a series of installation pieces that conceptually and formally map the international date line at Kiribati, the artist investigates officially assigned time and calls into question concepts such as "today" or "tomorrow".[2][3]

Aranda's 2007 work There has been a miscalculation (Flattened Ammunition) is an experiment on the functioning of time. This work consists in a transparent Plexiglas cube containing approximately 100 science-fiction novels with a story line taking place before 2007 (the year in which the work was first produced), which have been shredded, almost pulverized. It also contains a hidden computerized air compressor that unexpectedly and violently blows the dust around at random intervals, recalling a sudden sandstorm. This way, Aranda's work makes books endlessly circulate and swirl in an empty cube, leaving them incessantly suspended in a past future.[3]

For Intervals (2009), a solo presentation of four works installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Aranda explored and inverted the notion of time as a strictly assigned linear designation marked by clocks and calendars. In this exhibition, all the works were proposed to partially describe, in the artist's words "a sense of time's passage according to subjective experience, rather than subscribed to a strict system of measurement that assigns a fixed duration to any given event".[3] Each piece captures time's passage in an individualized sense, addressing what the artist conceives as "subject formation" and the assertion of one's dominion over one's own time as a condition for individualism.[2][3]

Conceived in 2004 in collaboration with Anton Vidokle, e-flux video rental (EVR) comprises a free VHS video rental store, a public screening room and an archive. Its collection is selected in collaboration with a large group of international curators, and consists of over 500 art films and video works that are available to the public for home viewing free of charge.[5] The project was originally presented in a storefront in New York, and has been presented at various locations around the world, with the inventory of videos continuously increasing. After seven years as a traveling project, EVR was donated to the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana in 2011 for its permanent display, which is a reconstruction of the original storefront at 53 Ludlow Street, New York. As a video rental store entering a museum collection, EVR will preserve and make available for future study not only the videos that comprise it, but also the social form of video rental stores, and the technology that originally made it possible.[6]

Released in 2007, Pawnshop is an e-flux project by artists Liz Linden, Julieta Aranda, and Anton Vidokle. Both an exhibition and an artwork in itself, this project was originally located in e-flux's 53 Ludlow Street storefront, which temporarily became a pawnshop dedicated to the pawning of artworks. Its initial inventory consisted of over 60 pawned works from a group of artists invited to participate in the project, and after it was opened for business, further artists were able walk in with a work they wanted to pawn. After the initial 30 days, the artworks that have not been retrieved by their original owners became available for sale.[7]

An online platform initiated by Aranda and Vidokle, Time/Bank is based on the premise that everyone in the field of culture has something to contribute and that it is possible to develop and sustain an alternative economy by connecting existing needs with unacknowledged resources. On a practical level, it is a platform where artists, curators, writers and other people in the field, can exchange time and skills—help each other get things done without using money. Idealistically, Time/Bank can become a place where certain types of actions and ideas, that seem to have no value in our market-driven society, can gain a sense of worth.[8][9]

It is possible to open a time bank account at e-flux.

SUPERCOMMUNITY is an editorial project by e-flux journal commissioned for the 56th Venice Biennale, which was run from May to August 2015. Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Brian Kuan Wood have been co-editors of this project, which addresses e-flux journal and its readership as the supercommunity and presents a daily piece of writing that often adopts the form of poetry, short fiction or screenplay.[10] It has featured contributions from nearly one hundred authors such as anthropologists, artists, philosophers, poets, theorists and writers.