Words: Josh Lee
Following its announcement in 2022 that it would partner with Frieze, the pre-eminent voice in the world of contemporary arts-and-culture, premium watchmaker Breguet is bringing what it calls a ‘series of curated presentations’ to its lounges at the famed art fairs this year, the series of which kicked off in New York, before going to Seoul, and will move across to London and Los Angeles in the coming months.
A partnership made in order to further solidify Breguet’s links and firm commitment to the arts, the responsibility of executing this year’s four displays has been appointed to Somi Sim, an independent curator based across Seoul and Paris and who is known for work that occupies the space between contemporary art, design, urbanism and history.
Curator Somi Sim
“What excites me about working with Frieze and Breguet is the potential to expand transdisciplinary discourses and perspectives. Reflecting on Breguet’s heritage of invention and know how [savoir-faire], I aim to explore how our perception of time is constructed, and how contemporary art can represent time occurring beyond the linear,” says Sim. “I want this collaboration to show the complexity of a ‘universal’ time, allowing us to recontextualise time across geopolitical divisions, cultural differences, and other boundaries.”
Taking place at Frieze New York, which was set across eight floors in The Shed art centre, in Manhattan, the tone-setter for this year’s collaboration was the display titled ‘Orbital Time’, an exhibition that showcased works by international artists, including a bespoke piece by Raqs Media Collective – nine clocks displaying local times, including those in three fictional cities and those in Frieze host cities, with the numbers replaced by states of mind throughout the day – that challenged the concept of standardised time. ‘Together the works play with conventions of horological history and disrupt our notion of time as a single, universal, linear concept,’ said Breguet.
In Seoul, the main theme was ‘Streaming Time’, which zoned in on ‘on-going time issues between the digital and the real, how time is both subjective experience and a central anchor of our interconnected world.’ The idea was specific to Seoul, a city known for its streaming culture.
Though details are yet to be revealed about the upcoming Frieze London installation – which will take place between 11–15 October – it is safe to expect that it will, with little doubt, be a unique dovetailing of envelope-pushing art forms with the notions of tradition and craft that are widely associated with Breguet and timekeeping.
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