Edna Baud: The Time Is Out of Joint

In a solo exhibition, Edna Baud presents a series of new paintings that address the decomposition of the experience of time.

The many crises of the present evoke a collective sense that linear time has fallen out of its ruts and lost its ability to order events. Consequently, rather than being grounded in a stable temporal continuum, our experience is constantly organised against an uncertain future. The conviction that time no longer runs linearly manifests itself in Edna Baud's painting in futuristic visions of a future world filled with machines of the industrial age. In Edna Baud's painting TORCH, we see a steam locomotive. Next to it stands a presumably female figure in a welding mask and working overalls. In her hand she holds a tool that resembles an airbrush more than a welder, which allows sheets of heavy metal to be physically fused together. The figure in the painting holds a notepad in his other hand - is he glancing at instructions on what colour to paint an existing locomotive, or perhaps - how to paint it properly, to reproduce it on a flat surface? Another of the paintings on show, WATCHTOWER, addresses the question of the representation of time itself. It is inspired, on the one hand, by a passage from Walter Benjamin's essay On the Notion of History (1940), in which he cites events at the time of the Paris Commune uprising (1871), when a rebellious populace shot clocks on church and palace towers. On the other, the events up to the so-called University of Texas Tower shooting - the first mass shooting in the United States, which took place in 1966.

The presentation of Edna Baud's latest paintings in the Ewa Opałka gallery / Together Pamoja Foundation located in the urban space of Warsaw's Muranów district with its pre-war and wartime ghetto context, as well as the post-war socialist realist project, makes it possible to take up the theme of the decolonisation of time in the realities of Central and Eastern Europe. The disruption and squeering of the linear understanding of time and space, and with it, the end of the modern hierarchical order and the future interacting with the past, we make a bold thesis about the possible radicalism of young figurative painting.