Archaeological Time Machines: Time in Archaeology and Contemporary Art

The archaeological imagination has emerged as an important theme in contemporary art in recent decades, beyond museum collections and restitution of cultural artifacts, with ideas such as excavation, the deep past or assemblages. Yet, more recently, it is archaeology, the traditional discipline of antiquity that has set its eyes on the present tense and became curious about the strategies of contemporary art to narrate historical time and its discontents. With its fresh interpretations of time, timescales and historical time as complex material forces and not simply chronologies, archaeology has found in contemporary art polyphonies that inform the ongoing process of transition in archaeology from excavation of the past, to decolonial praxis, interdisciplinary interpretation, multi-temporality, and new knowledge paradigms.

Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a researcher and art critic based in Dubai and Nicosia, writing about contemporary art in the broader Middle East for over a decade, with a focus on the relationship between art, archaeology, and heritage. His byline has appeared in The Markaz Review, Hyperallergic, the San Francisco Art Quarterly and Quotidien del'Art, among other publications.

He is the author of the forthcoming monograph, On Contemporary Art, Archaeology and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean (Bloomsbury).

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