One and Fifteen Hours Days

When you’ve watched the 14 hours of Exergue on documenta 14 (2024), I think you will be ready to watch Wang Bing’s 15 Hours (2017) as your next task.

– Adam Szymczyk message to students in the Ohio State University classes Contemporary Theory and Art Education and The Social World of the Arts, Fall 2025, befor watching the 14th chapter of Exergue on documenta 14 by Dimitris Athiridis, produced by Faliro House and distributed through an educational license by Kino Rebelde.

15 Hours [by Wang Bing] might seem like a simple gesture. One might dismiss it for its lack of analysis or criticize it for being a “mere” recording, a document that has failed to become a documentary. But this would be too easy. Instead, it is worth considering how the installation’s presentation of a protracted duration in all likelihood to be witnessed by no spectator in its totality may be understood in relation to longstanding film theoretical debates concerning realism and the long take, debates which have in recent years been reignited by the unprecedented durational possibilities of digital capture and the emergence of a strong documentary impulse in contemporary art. Situated at the intersection of these discourses, 15 Hours complicates key assumptions of both, exiting the cinema so as to reaffirm what for Siegfried Kracauer was a crucial capacity of film: “the power of deepening and rendering more intimate ‘our relation to this Earth which is our habitat.'”

– Erika Balsom ‘Wang Bing’s 15 Hours the Chimera of Endlessness’

Athens Documenta Diary, Day 1: Thirsty Work at EMST

Vast and dignified,
a golden eagle
is improbable
this far north.
These birds are known
to bring down young deer.
Bald eagles circle
most days, though
when I was a child
they were so rare
school stopped one day
so we could all walk
to the river and watch
as one lit upon oak’s crown.
Two perspectives
glide within:
Each day, over crossed
by birds of consequence—
eagles, hawks, snow geese, swans
I am beheld.
Each day I walk
until over crossed
by birds of consequence
I am beholden.

– Laura Da’, from ‘Bird’s-Eye View’ in Severalty (University of Arizona Press, 2025)

“What Is Real?” probes into manifestations of the real in a selection of both historical and 21st-century artworks. Each work of art is an act or a modest call to action. Often, the real can be sensed more profoundly in an abstract or conceptual work than in one that claims to imitate reality. A nonrepresentational work can express a political intention. A simple recording of reality can reveal a poetic quality in the real. A subversion of “how things usually are” reveals the real.

Is there a common ground of the real that we can share? The intention of this exhibition is to show how artists respond to the reality of human experience in all its dimensions, encompassing destruction and anger, sadness and grief, but also repair and healing, joy and celebration.

—Adam Szymczyk curatorial statement for ‘What is Real?’ AWT Focus, Art Week Tokyo, November 2025