Betelhem Makonnen
Rock Standard Time (RST)

Tito's Prize 2020 Exhibition
March 6 – April 4 (postponed March 17) • (reopened) August 13 – September 5, 2020

Rock Standard Time (RST) is an invitation to res(e)t our current climate of temporal anxiety. Feeling exiled from time, rather than being in and of it, it seems everyone is continually chasing after it and never catching up. How can we have time outside of imposed standards and within our best interests? Can we rush, if we must, but slowly? Works in photography, video, text and installation made through, with, and just in time ask us to shift our perspective and consider multiple scales and registers for time accounting.

Born from continuing conversations, correspondence and collaborations, the exhibition is a meditative resistance to the internalized ticks and tocks that assert we have no time to respond to ourselves, to each other, nor our world. Time in all its conjugation and tenses is inseparable from the human experience – we are time and time is on our side, yes it is.

Makonnen was unanimously selected as the 2020 Tito’s Prize recipient by a curatorial panel that includes Florencia Bazzano, Assistant Curator, Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin); Annette Lawrence, Artist, and Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas (Denton); and Rigoberto Luna, Director and Curator at Presa House Gallery (San Antonio).

Betelhem Makonnen researches questions on perception, presence, and place within a trans-temporal and trans-locative topology that operates on the relational dynamics of diasporic consciousness. In addition to her artistic practice, she is on the curatorial team of Fusebox Festival and co-editor of the online arts periodical Written & Spoken. She is also a founding member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project.

betelhemmakonnen.com