The Time Machine: Curated by Florencia Battiti

In his classic novel The Time Machine, H. G. Wells breaks with the idea of linear progress—that is, with the conception of time as an arrow always moving forward. Written in 1895 and adapted for the big screen in 1960 (with a remake in the early 2000s), the novel challenges modernist teleology, understood as the development of historical, social, and technological progress toward a superior and predetermined end. Instead, it intertwines temporalities, allowing the Victorian present to be understood as contingent rather than universal. Wells writes at the height of industrial modernity, when archaeology was expanding knowledge of the past and technology was imagining radical futures.

If we move the novel beyond the strictly literary realm, The Time Machine can function as a kind of conceptual framework for thinking about strategies of appropriation and citation in contemporary art, particularly in how both reconfigure time as a critical operation. For much of contemporary art, time has ceased to be a neutral backdrop—a chronology, a style, or a period—and has instead become a working material and, at times, a problem in itself. Both strategies reveal that all history is, ultimately, a process of selection. Thus, when an artwork reorganizes materials from another era, it exposes cultural time as editable and memory as never neutral. In this sense, every act of appropriation is a temporal stance: it determines what from the past remains alive and how it should be read today.

On the occasion of the inauguration of Sala Nazaré, a new temporary exhibition space in Balanz’s offices, we present a selection of works that propose the artist as a traveler—a globetrotter moving across time, activating fragments of the past. Like an explorer, the artist enters foreign temporalities and accesses historical layers to appropriate images and narratives, not as repetition but as critical reinterpretation.

If Vincent van Gogh painted sunflowers with thick, vibrant yellow oil paint—flowers that alluded to the natural cycle of life—Anselm Kiefer employs lead, straw, and ash, materials that age and deteriorate. Here, citation introduces a kind of temporal torsion: the post-Impressionist motif reappears, but transformed, in the aftermath of the catastrophe of the Holocaust. And if in Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez affirmed the status of the painter, Nicola Costantino reworks the gesture by shifting it toward the artist-mother, linking maternity with creativity and reordering gender hierarchies through her appropriation. Citation, then, beyond gestures of complicity, homage, and dialogue between artists across time, entails reactivating memory under new historical conditions.

Like the traveler in Wells’s novel, our artists belong to a time that does not correspond to the world they observe. Their works reveal latent memories, propose symbolic reinscriptions, and produce a “productive anachronism”—a poetic, critical, and meaningful friction between past and present.

Florencia Battiti