2053: A Living Museum (2016)
Tate Liverpool

Re-enactment of On Kawara, Past, Present, Future, first exhibited in 1966.

Within 2053: A Living Museum at Tate Liverpool, this performance presents a re-enactment of On Kawara’s Past, Present, Future as a durational exploration of embodied gesture and temporal repetition. Statistically positioned in space, the artist marked each passing, transforming time into a trace of presence — both recorded and inhabited.

By extending Kawara’s meditation on time and the everyday continuity of existence, the performance reimagined the museum as a living archive — one sustained through human engagement rather than static preservation. Revisiting a work first shown in 1966, its reappearance in Liverpool in 2016 introduced a renewed temporal distance: in the final gesture, the artist marked not the present but the future, creating a gap between self and presence that unfolded both physically in space and symbolically in the act itself. Through this re-enactment, the artist examined how the ephemeral might be prolonged, and how the passing moment can become both documentation and renewal.