TIME investigates the tension between measurable time and lived experience. In her photographic compositions, Carine Van Gerven introduces clocks and measuring devices not as instruments of certainty, but as fragile markers within a broader reflection on temporality.

The work questions the dominance of linear, registrable time — the time that structures history, progress, and social order — and contrasts it with time as it is experienced: subjective, layered, and unstable. Each image captures a moment while simultaneously exposing its impermanence. The act of looking already places the moment in the past.

Visually, TIME engages in a restrained dialogue with seventeenth-century portraiture. Through composition, attributes, and the controlled use of light, references to the Golden Age surface without becoming quotation or nostalgia. These historical echoes function as a temporal anchor, situating the work within a continuum rather than a fixed period.
Despite these references, the images remain firmly rooted in the present. The scenes depict contemporary personal narratives shaped by broader social conditions. Subtle shifts in clothing, objects, and gesture introduce ambiguity, allowing the images to oscillate between past, present, and future.

TIME does not propose time as a closed system, but as a field of tension — between measurement and memory, between individual experience and collective history. Meaning unfolds through perception, inviting the viewer to activate the work through their own temporal awareness.

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