“The hours are breathing, faint and low” is a site-spesific installation that encompasses the houses around Hollum’s church tower, the church tower itself, and the Dit Eiland gallery. the art piece echoes themes from Borges’ story “The Aleph” and poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The inhabitants who live around Hollum’s church tower share their stories of birth and death, belonging and journeying, intimacy and openness. Through the unique, personal telling of their own confrontation with such moments, their stories become part of a larger, universally shared history of instances when the veil between our world and a hidden “other” world is at its most translucent. The artists carefully revisit and unfold these stories and work with their essence to return them as individual gifts to the persons that told them. Using literary references, fairy tales and ancient, universal symbols, this process of telling and re-telling refers back to beliefs in a hidden, unseen place. The installation’s location becomes a place both otherworldly and real a map of actual and re-imagined lives. The exchange of gifts happens through individual art pieces, specifically made for the storytellers who display them in or near their houses during Art Month, In this sense, the full work also refers to the Dutch habit of allowing passers-by a furtive peek into the house, by keeping the curtains open. Thus the intimacy of personal life may be briefly witnessed by outsiders.
Venue: "Dir Eiland" gallery, Ameland.  (2011)
Curator:Timo Mank