The title is a line spoken by a woman describing the sound of the sea. In Samuel Beckett's Embers, written for radio in 1959, Henry sits at the edge of the water, talking so as not to hear it. He cannot enter it and he cannot leave. Ada, beside him, listens: "It is like an old sound I used to hear. It is like another time, in the same place." She is not describing water. She is describing the way time returns, not remembered exactly, not recovered, but arriving again, altered, inside the present. Radio is the right medium for such a sentence. A broadcast is always a signal sent from one time and arriving in another. The works in this exhibition behave this way. They repeat, drift, withhold, and return.
At the center of the exhibition, filling the room like a tide, is Zhang Peili's At Sea (2024), a three-channel video installation of seventeen minutes and thirty-six seconds, looped without beginning or end. A man drifts alone on open water among floating suitcases, a soaked teddy bear, an orange life ring, the scattered debris of a wreck that is never explained. Nothing about him signals emergency. He takes a call. He drinks. He inflates a balloon. He plays the Adagio from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto on his phone and lies back to listen. The artist's own description of the work is exact: the man's actions are entirely unrelated to his situation.
The film moves between two registers. The man in the water is given to us in black and white, in the tense of the archive, as though the present were already being remembered. The sea and sky are in color, vast and unbearably beautiful, the water hazing upward into enormous clouds. Between the figure and the horizon there is a difference not of place but of time. He is already footage. The world around him is still happening.
Zhang grew up in Hangzhou in a house full of instruments. The neighbor who influenced him most was a violinist; his first painting teacher was a carpenter, a friend of that violinist; his elder brother played the dizi, the suona, the bassoon, the saxophone. A clarinet arriving over open water is another time in the same place, a transmission of consolation from a world that no longer exists, beauty that keeps a man company without rescuing him.
A few kilometres from the gallery, in the Alte Nationalgalerie, hangs Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea: one figure upright before an immensity of water and sky. Zhang's drifter is that monk tipped from the vertical into the horizontal, awe replaced by ease. The sublime arrives and he checks his phone. This is why Alfredo Jaar's red neon I Can't Go On, I'll Go On (2016) burns here as the exhibition's one direct address, its single point of colour in the dark. The phrase is the last line of Beckett's The Unnamable, where stopping and continuing are equally impossible and continuing happens anyway. The man at sea cannot go on. He goes on.
Jaar's One Million Points of Light (2006) is a lightbox showing the surface of the Atlantic photographed from the coast of Angola, looking toward Brazil, along the route of the Middle Passage. Nothing is depicted except light on water. The beauty is the aperture, because what lies beneath it can scarcely be faced directly. Christina Sharpe writes of residence time, the span a substance remains in the ocean before leaving it, which for some elements runs to hundreds of millions of years. What entered the Atlantic is still in the Atlantic. The sea does not observe our distinction between past and present. The exhibition draws no equivalence between one solitary drifter and the millions carried across this water. It lets two works share a surface, the same water and not the same time, and keeps that difference open, as it must be kept.
Around the projection, Zhang's other works hold smaller vigils. 10 x 10 (2020) scatters one hundred small LED screens across the floor. Sometimes they light in sequence, each showing a single face; sometimes all hundred combine into one enormous face. The images are taken from the internet: wanted people and missing children. Between the one and the many, between the hunted and the searched for, the work flickers without deciding. Everyone adrift at sea is, on some shore, a missing face. One-Thousandth of a Second to One Second (1995) sets a row of photographs against the small manufactured wind of an electric fan, holding open the interval between an instant and a second. Wind is what raises waves. Here it blows indoors, at domestic scale, endlessly.
David Horvitz alters the exhibition's own time. Nautical Dusk (VII) (2017) is a bronze bell with engraved text, and for the run of the show the gallery will close each day at nautical dusk, the moment the sun stands twelve degrees below the horizon and the horizon itself disappears, the last instant a sailor can measure the sky against the sea. The bell rings the closing. The hour drifts each evening as the planet tilts, so the gallery keeps time by the light rather than by the city, like a vessel. Nautical dusk happens everywhere on earth and never at the same moment.
Two further works anchor his contribution. In 2006 Horvitz anonymously uploaded a short film to YouTube claiming it was newly discovered footage of Bas Jan Ader, who had sailed alone into the Atlantic in 1975 and was never found: a figure on a bicycle, riding into the sea. Thousands watched before it was taken down. From four seconds of super 8, eighty-three photographs, one for each frame. Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film is a rumor that became evidence, a signal that could not be recalled once broadcast. It hangs here as the missing man beneath every image of open water. Beside it, four metres of neon bent into the artist's handwriting: Whenever I take a shower I always wonder when the water was a cloud (2016). It is a thought anyone might have and almost no one keeps, that the water arriving in the most ordinary present has been elsewhere, has been weather, has been sea, and will be again. Jaar borrows a dead writer's last sentence and sets it in red. Horvitz answers in his own hand, first person, present tense, like a note written on a steamed mirror. One neon is a broadcast, the other a postcard.
In the back room, as an aside, hang the When the Ocean Sounds (Fizzle) watercolors (2018), painted with seawater and sea salt: open scores transcribed from the sound of the Pacific, which anyone may perform simply by reading them aloud. Beckett wrote the sea for radio; Horvitz writes it for the mouth. At the front desk waits Your Veins, Ocean Waves (2019), a rubber stamp pressed onto a visitor's arm. It rests on the skin above the pulse for a day and washes off. The salt underneath stays.
Near the end of Embers, Ada remembers the sea being rough once, the spray flying over them. Strange it should have been rough then, she says. And calm now. The exhibition lives inside that sentence, between rough then and calm now, between the event and its long afterlife. The sea continues underneath the voices, and after they stop.
