Nadija Mustapić: Time, She Said
The exhibition is a spatial audiovisual installation that, through moving image, multichannel sound and an original text, explores the relationship between human and geological time, the body and the environment, and water as a form of matter connecting different temporal and spatial scales.
On Sunday, 4 October at 7 p.m., Galerija 90-60-90 opens Nadija Mustapić’s solo exhibition Time, She Said at Pogon Jedinstvo in Zagreb.
The exhibition is a spatial audiovisual installation that, through moving image, multichannel sound and an original text, explores the relationship between human and geological time, the body and the environment, and water as a form of matter connecting different temporal and spatial scales.
Drawing on years of filming at the site of a single stream, Mustapić creates an immersive spatial installation in which water is not merely a motif within the depicted landscape, but a carrier of memory and change. Water passes through bodies, rocks, underground flows and the atmosphere; it disappears and reappears, connecting the human experience of time with processes that far exceed it.
In contrast to the deep time of geological processes stands the accelerated time of the present. Climate change is radically bringing closer together temporal scales that we have become accustomed to experiencing as distant from one another: melting glaciers, droughts, floods, changes in ocean currents and rising sea levels no longer belong to some abstract future. Time, She Said begins precisely from this collision – between the slowness with which the landscape remembers and the speed with which we change it.
The video, spatially distributed sound and text that make up the installation do not function as separate elements. Images of water and bodies, sound moving through the space, and a female voice speaking from an unstable position between the personal “I”, water and time form a shared perceptual field. The viewer does not observe the work from a single, predetermined position, but approaches it bodily, moving through image, voice, sound and space.
“I am saving all my waters for you,” says the voice in the work.
At the same time, this intimate gesture opens onto the question of collective responsibility. If our bodies are bodies of water, and the same water passes through human and non-human bodies, rivers, seas, clouds and the deep layers of the earth, the boundary between the individual and the environment becomes difficult to sustain. The ecological crisis is then no longer something that happens to “nature” outside us, but a transformation of the system to which we ourselves belong.
Time, She Said does not construct an apocalyptic image of the future, nor does it offer a simple solution. Instead, it slows down looking and listening, opening up a space of attention toward what is changing, disappearing and enduring beyond the measure of a single human life. Within this tension between powerlessness and responsibility, the possibility of a different relationship with the world emerges: an attempt at understanding, closeness and care. Because “… in the end, we will conserve only what we understand, because what we understand, we come to love.”
Time, She Said was first presented in 2024 at Galerija O.K. in Rijeka, and in 2025 at Xcenter in Nova Gorica as part of the PrePixx / Pixelpoint programme and the European Capital of Culture GO!2025. For the solo exhibition at Pogon Jedinstvo, the work is reconfigured in relation to the architecture of the exhibition space, developing the spatial relationship between image, multichannel sound, text and the viewer’s body.
