Look through the Black Hole Viewfinder
VSSL Studio presents Time Is On Our Side, an exhibition by Black Quantum Futurism. The exhibition concludes VSSL Studio’s programme Entanglements of the Apocalypse.
Co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield, and Ash McNaughton, the exhibition explores and draws on Black Quantum Futurism’s understandings of time and information to reimagine the black hole as a site of creation, transformation, and shared temporal experience.
Time Is On Our Side draws on Black Quantum Futurism’s understandings of time, darkness, and information to reimagine the black hole from a site of destruction into one of creation and transformation. Akin to Irma Thomas’s version of Time Is On My Side—recorded before it was displaced, disconnected from its origin, and later reclaimed—the exhibition understands temporality as a non-linear experience: what crosses an event horizon is not necessarily destroyed or lost. It is only delayed, displaced, or rendered illegible outside the visible boundary of the Western linear timeline running from past to present to future.
At the centre of the exhibition, the Black Hole Viewfinder poses the event horizon as a threshold rather than a predetermined ending. It is a spacetime where my side turns into our side, and where private time crosses interstitially into shared durations. As with the black hole’s information paradox, recognition may arrive out of sequence—returned altered, yet still conveying an intentional message. Time, under these circumstances, can obscure, but it can also curve back on itself, revealing, redeeming, and restoring what was once considered lost.
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is an interdisciplinary practice founded by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that synthesizes quantum physics with Afrodiasporic principles and ontologies of time, space, ritual, text, and sound, yielding an innovative framework for the creation of counterhistories and alternate futures. Rooted in a commitment to challenge mainstream narratives, BQF actively confronts exclusionary perspectives of history and the future, offering critical alternatives that uplift Black experiences and possibilities.
The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
VSSL Studio, Unit 8, 50 Resolution Way, Deptford, London, UK, SE8 4AL from 27 February to 22 March 2026
More info at www.blackquantumfuturism.com.
Studio website: https://vssl-studio.org/Programme
