Nemes, Csaba: Timeless (1996)

The photo series Timeless depicts church towers that don’t have a clock, though their place was designed by the architect. The artist highlights the gaps in the images, the lack of the clocks, with an acid-etched glass panel placed on the photo. “It occurred to me in the early 1990s that even the smallest German, Austrian or Swiss villages have a clock on the church tower. In the southern countries, however, there is usually no place for clocks, probably because of their quite different relationship to time. In our region, on the other hand, it seems there was a need to have clocks, but there was not always money for it, or it was melted down during the war to extract the metal from it and then the state of shortage became permanent. This was not rare, what’s more, in villages – and often in cities – it is still the case today: the clock is missing from the church towers. … I like the term ‘timeless’ for the two different interpretations. On the one hand, the absence of a clock seems to indicate a lack of time, a ‘vacuum-like’ situation, which is timeless and indefinite. On the other hand, it also means that this has always been and probably always will be the case: it refers to fate, the life situation, in which we seem to have been for a long time: things are very difficult to change, but even if they change, we are always lagging behind the countries we measure ourselves against, that is, Western Europe.”