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Timepiece
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2026 © Else/Xun Zhang
Timepiece
9’34’’, single-channel video, colour, no sound, loop, 2025
Created for screens in the waiting rooms of West Middlesex Hospital’s new Ambulatory Diagnostic Centre (ADC), Timepiece is a film to accompany those who wait. In an unbroken long take, a figure wanders on the beach, gathers a handful of pebbles, shows them up close to the viewer, and goes on to gather another handful. The camera sits still and the film plays in loop.
As someone who is chronically ill, I spend much of my time in waiting rooms looking at clocks. Clock time is rigid, linear, indifferent; it runs forward while I fall behind. As time-based media, can moving image be used as an alternative way of telling time, a time that meets sick, still, and waiting bodies? Gathering forms of rhythm in the repetitive movements of the performer, the sea and the birds that occasionally land in the frame, this project is an attempt to facilitate tangible, cyclical, and non-accelerative experience of time, offering a sense of control in the uncertainty of the waiting environment.
Commissioned by CW+, charity of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and developed in dialogue with waiting room receptionists at West Middlesex Hospital
Filmed and edited by Else/Xun Zhang
Performed by Siying Cui
With the generous support from Jordan Baseman, Miao Tan, Siying Cui, Echo/Yuhan, Emily Thomas, and Laura Bradshaw