Named after Aldous Huxley’s acclaimed 1932 novel, this mesmerizing film-based work questions relationships between ritual and technological time through a captivating kaleidoscopic illusion where past, present, and future converge. A TV set is situated within an angled box of mirrors whose reflections create a perfect globe. Visitors are invited to peer inside and experience a fractalization of time. Images of the Twin Towers before 9/11, Balinese dancers, an Ethiopian Orthodox celebration of Epiphany, airplanes, advertisements, and baseball games repeat, reverse, and dissolve into one another. Each viewer is also caught, our reflections bearing infinite witness to a world in which people, ideas, and captured moments travel, move in cycles, and converge. Time becomes an ongoing, ever-changing state of mind. Each edition of Theo Eshetu’s Brave New World has a unique soundtrack: for I, the artist incorporated a score by Arvo Pärt in which high-tech instruments evoke the timeless soundscapes of rituals.
