At Konschthal Esch, David Claerbout tests cognition through subtle distortions and the manipulation of time itself. Gabriela Acha explores how his digital environments turn time into both medium and illusion.
As the title 5 hours, 50 days, 50 years suggests, David Claerbout’s work is deeply concerned with the concept of time in the moving image. Although the motifs depicted in his films are diverse, they consistently engage with the paradoxical nature of cinematic temporality: the closer a film comes to representing real time, the more difficult it becomes for the viewer to endure. Conventional film narratives, therefore, rely on the condensation of time to produce a coherent and engaging experience. Time and motion constitute the two fundamental dimensions of the moving image, and Claerbout’s practice is dedicated to manipulating these in order to unsettle the viewer’s perception and challenge their cognitive expectations.
At the Konschthal Esch, Claerbout’s exhibition unfolds across three floors, each largely dedicated to a single work. By chance, I began my visit on the third floor, where I first encountered The Woodcarver and the Forest (2025). From there, I moved on to Olympia (2016) and Backwards Growing Tree (2023), two works projected side by side in the adjacent room. I then descended to the second floor, where, directly beneath Olympia and Backwards Growing Tree, the very same films were being shown again.
“Wait, what?” I thought at first, before assuming that this must simply be the order of things in 5 hours, 50 days, 50 years. Perhaps this was what the “madness” mentioned in the introductory wall text referred to – the rupture between my vision and my perception of the world, the so-called “feeling of smooth hallucination.”[1] In this exhibition, cognition is tested not only through subtle distortions and machinic image generation but also through the unexpected manipulation of physical space. I eventually reconciled with what I had initially regarded with skepticism and allowed myself to be carried by the smooth hallucinations devised by Claerbout.[2]
I then watched Olympia (The real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the course of a thousand years) for the second time – or rather, a minuscule fragment of it, since the complete work spans an entire millennium. Such duration is made possible through computer simulation, which reconstructs the stadium built for the Nazi 1936 Olympic Games and renders its gradual decay over time. The simulation operates according to real-time environmental parameters – such as the position of the sun, the intensity of light, humidity levels and other atmospheric conditions. The resulting scene is thus generated entirely from data and mathematical modeling, without the direct intervention of a camera or a human hand.
I entered the space directly beneath The Woodcarver and the Forest (2025) on the second floor, where I – now unsurprised – found myself watching the same film once again. Sitting on a similar cushion placed at the same spot, I again watched the bearded logger carve a piece of wood into the shape of a spoon, in his brutalist villa surrounded by a dense – most likely artificially generated – forest. The amplified sound of the metal sliding and rubbing against the wooden surface became unexpectedly pleasant, reminiscent of the “oddly satisfying” short videos of machines cutting pasta, mixing paint or smoothing melted chocolate into moulds. This effect is, in fact, deliberately achieved, informed by the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) phenomenon, through which Claerbout seeks to deceive the senses.
Woodcarving is a popular form of mindful resistance to the omnipresence of screens and digital devices. Claerbout, however, transforms this gesture of withdrawal into a conceptual paradox: he presents, on a screen, an activity designed precisely to evade it – extended over a twenty-hour duration. As the exhibition curator Ory Dessau observes in its catalogue, the work functions as “a ruthless deforestation machine disguised as an image of mindfulness,” exposing a latent violence underlying both ecological exploitation and aesthetic contemplation. The work thereby collapses the distinction between meditative attention, mechanical production and environmental destruction.
The latter turned a recurrent topic in Claerbout’s work, present in works such as Wildfire (Meditation on Fire) (2019–2020), a simulated close-up of a forest fire filmed from a position no human body could inhabit. This inhuman perspective, compressed into a twenty-four-minute temporal frame, stages an impossible proximity to catastrophe. Claerbout’s sustained engagement with cycles of creation and destruction thus acquires a posthuman dimension where nature and technology, as well as perception and simulation converge in a single image that reveals the limits of human experience – and its fragility.
Human decentring is a constant in Claerbout’s practice, which often navigates art, entertainment, and parascience at their intersection. Although his work depends on human-made technology, his process minimises direct human intervention: no camera operator, no filmed subjects. Yet the simulations remain fundamentally anthropogenic, as their parameters are set by human intention. The human hand is displaced, not erased, operating through algorithms rather than gestures. Each work constructs a world sustained by simulated temporality, where the hyperreal supplants the real. As Jean Baudrillard observed, the proximity to reality in the hyperreal produces its own disappearance, and Claerbout’s images evoke that tension: the more reality they approximate, the more they estrange it. His digital environments thus stage the paradox of contemporary perception, where cognition oscillates between belief and disbelief. In this sense, Claerbout transforms cinematic duration into algorithmic process, and thus time into both medium and illusion – an artificial construct through which the “real” is continually deferred.
[1] Ory Dessau, David Claerbout, 2025, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln and Konschthal Eschp, p.8
[2]Ory Dessau, David Claerbout, 2025, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln and Konschthal Eschp, p.8
