THE QUESTIONING OF TIME, ACCORDING TO DÍAZ MORALES

The Madrid-based gallery carlier | gebauer presents The Shadow Out of Time, the ninth solo exhibition by Sebastián Díaz Morales (Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, 1975) in the space. Included in the OFF program of PHotoESPAÑA, the exhibition brings together several bodies of work that connect with his institutional project El Cielo Cayendo, presented in Buenos Aires last year, in which he explores the almost archaeological presence of past and future civilizations within the present.

Drawing on a text by H. P. Lovecraft, the exhibition engages with interruptions and tensions in perception and the ways in which the world is apprehended and assimilated. Within this narrative framework, the Argentine artist reconsiders the notion of the “shadow” as a vestige of a world that no longer exists. Installed across a single gallery space, the works operate individually as devices that capture atemporal fragments, configuring alternative realities in which time is subjected to multiple variations.

Despite the sense of a cohesive, sensory environment, the exhibition reveals specific functional logics within each piece. Fragmentos antes de la medianoche (2025) introduces ancient human texts into the interface of a contemporary smartwatch, while Chronos (2026) and Vela (2018–2019) engage directly with the inversion and suspension of time as a perceptual condition.

Tweeter para un parlante roto (2025–2026) shifts the register from text to sound through a damaged loudspeaker that activates the surrounding environment. The device, deteriorated and stripped of the technological refinement expected of its original function, reproduces bird calls oscillating between the recognizable and the distorted. The Shadow Out of Time does not aim at the faithful reconstruction of a sequence of events, but instead focuses on their consequences and a retrospective gaze toward a prior existence.

The Shadow Out of Time can be seen until 25 July 2026 at carlier | gebauer, José Marañón 4, Madrid (Spain).