Everything we call the world — everything we grasp, feel and think — lives in a narrow slit of time: three seconds. Then the moment flies away, loses its sharpness and becomes a memory or an absence.
What we perceive as “now” is not stable. Neuroscience has shown that our conscious presence occurs in three-second bursts of experience. After that, a new time stream begins — a new “now” that swallows up the previous one. During these two-second windows, our brain stores information such as the sound of a melody, the gesture of another person or the movement of our own body. Once the stimulus has ended, the sorting begins — and so does the forgetting.
The artists in this exhibition explore the space between what was and what is no longer. Their works celebrate the ephemeral in-between, where an image disintegrates, a form flees and a thought dissolves.
Drei Sekunden is an attempt to make the absent visible. The exhibition creates spaces for the ephemeral and opens up resonant spaces for the present moment, which slips away from us as soon as we grasp it. Here, absence is not viewed as loss, but as a prerequisite for perceiving presence. After all, only that which passes can have been present.