Art Exhbition
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Parkway New York NY 11238-6052 United States

10/29/21-06/26/22

In A Crack in the Hourglass media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (born Mexico City 1967) responds with a participatory transitory “anti-monument” for the time of the pandemic and the ways it has halted public rituals of mourning.
The public is invited to submit photographs of loved ones lost to COVID-19 at www.acrackinthehourglass.net accompanied by a personalized dedication and to watch in-gallery or via livestream as a modified robotic plotter deposits grains of hourglass sand onto a black stage to recreate the image. After each portrait is completed it is slowly erased by gravity. The entire process is archived on the website and the same sand is then recycled into the next portrait forming a limitless number of memorials and emphasizing the collective and ongoing nature of the pandemic.
Commissioned by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City in 2020 this installation is the first live presentation of the work offering physical space to collectively mourn and honor victims of COVID-19 in New York City—an area with one of the highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the United States—and worldwide.