Trapped by Time

5 December 2022 -23 January 2023

Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, Edinburgh

Trapped by Time (2022) is a contemporary art installation supported by VACMA funding that included a research stage in which Alena involved the local community to participate. The installation also has an interactive element in a form of a thought-provoking question that viewers are invited to respond to: If time invited you for a coffee, what would you ask?

Over the Autumn period, reflecting on her own personal frustration between funding applications, Alena conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 13 participants including tenants, employees, and visitors of the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre. She tried to capture the themes and metaphors that people have regarding Time in their everyday lives. She also asked participants to envision time as a concept beyond clocks and watches. At the end of each interview, she asked each participant to hand her an ordinary object from their working or home environment that would visually represent the symbol of time to them in an abstract way at their current stage of life. Inspired by a corner under the magnificent staircase that people see straight away when entering the building, Alena assembled various objects that she received in a side-responsive intervention.

In Artist’s own words:

 “ Perhaps I am challenged by two intriguing questions here: Does Time even exist? And if it is a man-made concept, why we are so much losing ourselves with it?

My initial inspiration though was based on my childhood memories since my dad who is based in Donbas (Eastern Ukraine) is passionate about repairing old Soviet Union watches and clocks. There are hundreds of them tick-tocking at my parents’ home which I was last able to visit in 2021. That summer their sound was particularly significant since Donbas was lost in time being turned into the Russian military base. But my dad still today repairs the watches and clocks of the remaining people from his community. It felt to me as if he is a Timekeeper of the place that had little hope…”

 Alena Rogozhkina