Sarah Wendt + Pascal Dufaux

« If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. »

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing. Resisting the Attention Economy, p. 94

“Miel du temps / Honey Time transforms the gallery space of Musée d'art de Joliette into sensorial rooms filled with works in which vision, sound, and touch intertwine. The exhibition looks at how we perceive our environments, and also our notion of time. By offering a critical and poetic reflection on the attention economy, Wendt+Dufaux examines the essential choices that define our relationship to the world. To whom and to what do we choose to pay attention, and what methods do we use to do so? How much time do we give to other beings and life forms around us? How is their sentience different from ours? How do we relate to the other beings, territories, or spaces we live in, and how do these shape our experience of the world?”

Marianne Cloutier, Curator of the exhibition.

Exhibitions :

Musée d'art de Joliette, Quebec, (Canada) 2024.

Supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec.

Press:

Le Devoir in french

La Presse in french

Magazine Le Sabord in french

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Room 1: Honey Clock installation

The Honey Clock is a call to deceleration through the reappropriation of attention. Like a deprogramming system, it fosters a more gentle and organic relationship to time. Through their environment, Wendt and Dufaux attempt to recreate what the passage of time feels like in our minds and bodies. Images of flowing honey—slowing dripping and penetrating a membrane leading to the adjoining vessel—are captured by a system of cameras and retransmitted in real time. The video Oracles is embedded within this same projection, allowing both spaces and temporalities to better coexist. In their alveolus, oracles—imaginary half-human, half-insect creatures—form the link between the world of humans and the world of bees.

Room 2: Somatic Sculptures

How do we interact and communicate with our bodies, or through touch? What kinds of sensibilities and responsibilities arise from this? This group of somatic sculptures invites us to manipulate each object, to give it life, to take the time to touch and feel it: to ground ourselves in our bodies to better engage with others. Here, Wendt and Dufaux examine atypical perceptions and the ways in which each person’s sensitive experience varies, since our understanding of external stimuli is always based on our uniqueness as individuals. This project also explores how our senses act together and how this dynamic changes when one of them fails. It invites us to question how our sensorial differences modulate our relationship to time and, consequently, our attention, even our responsibility to the communities and beings that surround us.

Room 3: Heterotopias

“ … as a rule, heterotopia juxtaposes in one real place several spaces that, normally, would be, should be, incompatible.”
Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique, Les hétérotopies, 2009

In third room, the duo also looks at the museum institution as the ultimate counter-site. In fact, the museum allows for the layering of eras, where artworks from every period coexist in collections or within the same exhibition. By intervening directly on the museum’s walls, Wendt and Dufaux help us reflect on what occurs behind these walls, how the institution functions, and the work that is carried out here. They underline the uniqueness of a bustling place that exists both within, and on the margins of, society, and whose ecosystem actively participates in the making of history. The metaphor of the museum as a hive—anchored in its territory—is highlighted by the use of honey as a creative material: it acts as a landscape in concentrated form, the essence of the land harvested and transformed by workers inside the hive.