The Orchard of Vanishing Times

Spread across this gallery space are images related to ancient astrology, timekeeping devices, and navigation instruments. As we wander through this labyrinth of images, we contemplate how humanity imagined the structure of the cosmos and the cycles of seasons from observing the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, and how our consciousness of time has evolved through these observations.

In ancient Egypt, time and seasons were understood through observing the sun and stars. By observing the moment when Sirius, the brightest star in Canis Major, rose before dawn, the Egyptians predicted the timing of the Nile’s floods. This observation led them to discover the length of the solar year. Subsequently, the Julian calendar was introduced during Julius Caesar’s time, establishing leap years every four years. Pope Gregory XIII further refined this in 1582 with the Gregorian calendar, which reduced the frequency of leap years. Meanwhile, the lunar calendar, based on moon phases, was invented earlier in Mesopotamian civilization. In ancient China, calendars were created based on celestial observations, eventually adopting the lunisolar calendar. In Islamic regions, a purely lunar calendar is used. While globalization has established the Gregorian calendar as the international standard across all these traditions, regional and religious calendars continue to be used distinctly for religious rituals and seasonal festivals.

In The Orchard of Vanishing Times, we contemplate vanished calendars and lost time through images from ancient eras, generated with the help of AI following a meticulous prompting process developed after the artist conceived their own calendrical system.

ㅡ Mami Kataoka