Durée / Real time
Baurjan Aralov
STAGES

With STAGES, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark has created a contemporary format that offers a visible platform for young and emerging artists from Graz and Styria. What began as a full-length evening program has evolved into an expanded presentation format: A one-time presentation — such as an artist talk, a performance, or a concert — is typically followed by an exhibition lasting several weeks, offering insights for a wider audience into the featured works. In this way, STAGES creates an open space for artistic approaches, experiments, and critical engagement, and as a regularly recurring program, it strengthens the local art scene by making young art accessible to a broad audience.

Baurjan Aralov’s paintings navigate the tension between memory, dream, and perception. From fragments of personal and collective experiences, visual worlds emerge that are neither reality nor pure imagination, but rather liminal spaces — that is, threshold states and physical or virtual places of transition, such as those we experience when moving from childhood to adulthood, but also in so-called hypnagogia, the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Hypnagogia refers to the fading of consciousness, during which fleeting, dreamlike images or brief flashes of thought are often experienced, even though one still feels awake. Aralov’s paintings thus become an approach to the unconscious.

Shaped by family stories, cultural influences, and an intuitive painting process, his works re-examine the fragility of memory and explore how images, identity, and memory are constantly being reconstructed. Drawing on the philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, Aralov simultaneously addresses the experience of temporality. What Bergson describes as la durée—that is, real time — is not measurable time as on a clock, but rather the inner experience of time. For Bergson, time is not a sequence of seconds of equal duration, but a continuous flow of consciousness in which past, present, and future cannot be understood as clearly separable entities, but rather always merge into one another in what shapes our current experience — that is, in memories, feelings, and expectations as well.

Accompanying the exhibition A.rtificial I.ntrospection O., which takes a close look at the work of Oswald Wiener and, building on his reflections on cybernetics, machines, thought, and self-observation, also presents contemporary positions that engage with advancing technological development, experience itself plays a central role insofar as Wiener considered experienced feelings and emotions as the distinction between humans and machines. According to Wiener — though this may be changing with the rapid development of AI — machines, unlike humans, were not capable of developing ideas or ​“experiencing” feelings. In this sense, Aralov’s focus on experience — in which time, so to speak, is no longer counted but falls into oblivion — is an apt extension of the current group exhibition A.I.O. and prompts reflection on what the experience of time actually is.

Cows Watching Me Cry, Oil on jute, 180 x 180 cm, 2022
Field of Certainty, Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm, 2025
Kukucksnest (Cuckoo’s nest), Oil on canvas 100 x 50 cm, 2026