In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop)

Featuring the work of filmmakers Andreas Bunte (Berlin), Denis Côté (Montreal), and Daniel Eisenberg (Chicago), In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop) turns a lens on manufacturing and the ways that material, bodies, and value are shaped by industry. All three films scrutinize the act of making, and position viewers to consider the labor of manufacturing as carefully as they would other skilled forms of production. Spare and elegant, these films also harness their form, a time-based medium, to capture the tempo of the workday, process as durational performance, and objects of labor as measures of time.

Introducing the films and keeping time in the background is The Speed of Markets, an installation by collaborators Varvara & Mar (Tallinn and Barcelona, respectively), consisting of seven metronomes set to follow and translate into rhythm the real-time trade volume of the stock markets. The Speed of Markets sets the labor depicted in the films against the ticking of the metronomes (which frequently creates a chaotic tempo) and grounds the market’s abstraction of tangible goods and services back in the material.

The complex interdependencies between humans and tools, tools and objects, and objects and humans build a shared, ambient melody that emerges across the films’ soundtracks and the metronomic rhythms. Meant as a poetic opportunity for reflection, In Time is also a meditation on the choreography of fabrication, the dignity of labor, and the unexpected ways material becomes immaterial.

The compendium film program, Slow Looking presents additional works by Bunte, Côté and Eisenberg that further explore these dynamics.

In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop) is organized by MAD’s William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator Shannon R. Stratton and Curatorial Assistant and Project Manager Sophia Merkin.

Support for In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop) is generously provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.