Time Killer

Time Killer considers how even a global pandemic with devastating consequences can, through the libidinal logic of capitalism, be transformed into an entertainment product for later consumption. The exhibition comprises the video work QuaranTEAM and three works on paper titled Quarantine Self Portraits 1, 2, 3.

QuaranTEAM brings together recordings from two very different situations. The footage was shot in 2021, towards the end of the pandemic, while Hammer Juhl was confined to a quarantine hotel for fourteen days upon arriving in South Korea for an artist residency. Filming herself as she moves around the room, she documents the daily visits of hotel staff, who point a thermometer at her forehead, as well as the longing for the world outside, glimpsed through the hotel window.

The soundtrack was recorded during the artist’s visit to a pandemic-themed escape room. Here, Hammer Juhl and two friends take part in a team-building exercise in which they must work together to resolve the catastrophe of a fictional viral outbreak. The title refers to #QuaranTEAM, a hashtag used during the pandemic to describe the small group of people chosen as one’s companions during restrictions on social gatherings. The non-diegetic sound was produced collaboratively by Mette Hammer Juhl and Andreas Stoubye Johansen.

The three self-portraits were made in the quarantine hotel using the limited materials available in the room. Three times a day, food was left outside the door. Hammer Juhl used the broth from instant noodles supplied by the hotel to paint her reflection in its mirrors. Like the ultraviolet light used to trace contamination during the pandemic, UV light makes the otherwise nearly invisible portraits appear.

The contemporary market offers an expanding range of products stripped of the very qualities that define them: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. Mediated reality extends this logic, offering reality without its substance. Just as decaffeinated coffee resembles the real thing while removing its effect, the participants in QuaranTEAM enact a decaffeinated version of the pandemic: catastrophe converted into a recreational challenge.

This mediated reality has become a condition of late capitalism whose consequences we have barely begun to absorb. Distinctions between work and leisure, entertainment and labour, catastrophe and amusement are increasingly difficult to maintain. We no longer know whether we kiss our children goodnight because we have seen it done in films. Journalists must resist interpreting the war in Ukraine through narrative structures constructed in Hollywood. Nor can we be certain whether the figure in the video is the artist herself, whether it is the artist who offers the critique or the character who enjoys the game.

Reality has taken the form of an escape room from which there is no escape. But it is fun.