Alicja Kwade presents Against the Run, 2023, commissioned and produced by the Pinacoteca Agnelli.

The multifaceted practice of Alicja Kwade (Poland, 1979) tackles the powerful energies that govern the universe. Her work explores and challenges the essence of our reality by way of transcending conventional confines. With a sharply poetic gaze, Kwade uncovers the nuances where philosophical and scientific dialogues meet the limitations of our perception, encouraging viewers to engage in profound contemplation of the human experience and its boundaries. Against the Run (2023) is a new commission created by the artist for the Pista 500. An apparently ordinary clock, similar to those found on city streets, stands in one of the garden's flowerbeds. At first glance, its hands appear to move backward, reversing the clock's mechanism and thus the linearity of time. In truth, it is the clock's face that is moving while the hands continue to mark the exact time. Through this small trick of perception, Kwade opens up a reflection on our dependence on an arbitrary convention in daily life, such as that of time.

The project connects to the history of the Lingotto factory. In fact, the design of Against the Run is inspired by the clock model that has been used historically in FIAT factories, evoking the central role that time measurement played in the factory as a primary indicator of the productivity of the workers. The artwork also seems to reference the famous "clock’s hands strike" of 1920 when, in opposition to the implementation of daylight saving time, the workers of FIAT Brevetti in Turin decided to set all the clocks in the plant back by one hour. The workers' action was a small one, yet it challenged a massive rule, that of coordinated universal time – which, in Italy's case, was historically set in the city of Turin. It was from here that, until 2016, the time signal was transmitted, namely the famous chime broadcast by RAI (the Italian state broadcaster) to mark each hour. In the workers' gesture a hundred years ago, as in Kwade's work today, the questioning of the measure upon which our days are based exposes the instability of the modern concept of progress as well as human fragility in the face of its unraveling.

Courtesy the artist and Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino
@ Images Sebastiano Pellion di Persano