Installed within a newly constructed cinema space inside Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Christian Marclay’s The Clock arrives in Berlin for the first time, carrying the weight of its own mythology. First unveiled in 2010 and awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale the following year, the 24-hour video installation has since become a widely circulated and frequently discussed work of contemporary art. Yet its Berlin debut feels neither nostalgic nor redundant. Instead, the work lands with renewed urgency, asking what it means to experience time collectively, cinematically, and bodily, all within an institution built on modernist ideals of clarity and order.
Composed of thousands of film and television clips spanning over a century, The Clock is meticulously synchronized to local time, collapsing cinematic fiction into lived reality: a wristwatch glance, a ticking wall clock, a whispered “we’re late”. Each moment aligns precisely with the viewer’s present. This fusion of real and represented time produces a strange double consciousness: one is acutely aware of the passing minutes while simultaneously seduced into narrative fragments that never fully resolve. Time, here, is both hyper-visible and perpetually slipping away.
What distinguishes this presentation is the architectural and curatorial restraint. Removed from spectacle, the darkened cinema space isolates attention, allowing sound and image to dictate rhythm. As hours pass, tonal shifts mirror the emotional texture of a single day. Continually, we teeter between suspense and banality, intimacy and disaster. Marclay’s work suggests that time is not a linear progression, but rather a cyclical accumulation.
While The Clock has been widely canonized, the piece’s power lies in repetition rather than revelation. In Berlin, it functions less as a novelty than as a quiet, inexhaustible mechanism. Here, the work renders spectators momentarily inside the machinery of time itself, reminding us that watching is never passive, and time is never neutral. —Charles Moore
