The German artist Viola Yesiltac has noticed in recent years that her performances have more and more resembled photographs (standing against photo studio backdrops, she would make only the most minimal and mundane movements), and her photography has more and more looked like a performance (palpable traces of activity and feelings hovering in empty spaces). 

In her new project at Artist’s Space, Yesiltac pinpoints time as the factor that charges her practice. In the place of Yesiltac, a paid actor will occupy the gallery at all times, standing in front of a photo backdrop frame. Yesiltac herself will visit the gallery every night to draw on the walls, tracing from a slide projection a Photograph by Albert Renger Patzsch Beech Forest, 1936. Juxtaposing these elements, Yesiltac manipulates two types of nowness: the frozen moment of the photograph becomes a natural and inexorable growth of lines on a wall; the infinitely extended, always unraveling moment of human presence aspires to the fixity of a photograph.

Beech Forest is the first installment of When Time Becomes Form, an ongoing performance series of long-durational work, curated by Marina Abramovic for Artists Space. The series explores and questions issues of concentration, will power, and determination,
and involves the artists’ use of the entire gallery space for 6 hours during each day of their performance. Twelve distinct, but interrelated, durational performances, each created and presented by a different performance artist (a member of the Independent Performance Group (IPG)), will occupy the Main Space galleries between exhibitions. The entire series will unfold over the course of the next two years.