In Search of Lost Time, 2023

mixed media, counter-clockwise clock mechanism


Photo: Avital Bar-Shay


The work features a wall-mounted clock whose hands move in the opposite direction to the customary clockwise flow. Intervention in reality, and the possibility of harnessing it into action, recur throughout Belu-Simion Fainaru's oeuvre from the very outset.

The work emphasises the elusive quality of time and the stratified meanings it carries as a subjective state of consciousness shaped by countless personal and environmental factors. Formative dates in a person's life, both individual and national-collective, constitute essential temporal markers.

October 7, 2023, for Fainaru, is a watershed moment between before and after, reinforcing a personal desire to return to the past through imagination and the senses in the face of a continuous, traumatic and nightmarish present. The work's title cites Marcel Proust's eponymous novel, emerging from a non-schematic perception of reality in constant flux, where characters are exposed to abrupt turns and contradictions.

Belu-Simion Fainafu: "The installation relates to the passage of time, offering a journey in search of lost time. What appears as forward motion becomes backward movement. Tangible matter becomes memory. The work alludes to the impossibility of summing up or containing time, in the hope that the end point is also a point that preceded the beginning."