Beyond Time

Beyond Time is an attempt to translate how I think about spacetime into a series of photographs. It is inspired by the idea of imaginary time in which the flow of time is not linear. By experimenting in the darkroom the bodies in the photographs seem to be appearing out of – or disappearing into the cosmos. — Julie van der Vaart

Landscapes and bodies – these are two subjects that recur constantly in the work of Julie van der Vaart. Her photographic archive contains innumerabe monochrome series of nudes and romantic vistas, from which she can continually compile new series. Whether a photo was taken yesterday or two years ago is immaterial. The temporal dimension has recently started playing a greater part in her work. Inspired by theories of non-linear time, astrophysics and quantum mechanics, she has begun experimenting in the darkroom. For the “Beyond Time” series, she manually processed her photos with chemicals to produce bodies that seem to dissolve into the cosmos, simultaneously appearing and disappearing. A photo is prosaically a record of the past, but now it remains eternally afloat in imaginary time. — Merel Bem