Houred Time

The third edition of September Sessions presents Houred Time—a three-day programme curated by anorak (Johanna Markert and Lukas Ludwig), with newly conceived work by artists Annika Eriksson, and Jules Reidy, alongside a screening programmed by Nour Ouayda.

The invited artists share a language of estrangement that unsettles habitual ways of seeing and feeling. Working across time-based media, their distinct approaches include speculative narration, staged observation, and the deconstruction and spatialisation of sound. Houred Time unfolds through performance, installation, film, and conversation across various venues in Stockholm, including Antics, Folkets Bio Zita, Cues, and Mint.

Houred Time is a mistranslation of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1953 poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit, where ‘gestundet’ means deferred or delayed. In a financial context, it is a term used to describe an extension of due debt; its temporal application is more literal—time broken up into regular units. Bachmann’s poetry is characterised by fragmentation, repetition, and an acute awareness of mortality; the title poem is bookended by the phrase “Harder days are coming” invoking a temporality shaped by inevitability and return.

Her poetic rigour exploring interpersonal boundaries and the potential of language in a postwar landscape offers a perspective on memory, grief, and historical trauma that resonates with the festival’s contemporary premise: that living through horror demands new, situated forms of perception and imagination. Houred Time draws on the belief that art must show radically different ways of expressing its time, rather than repeat its dominant phrases. Bachmann’s voice—unblended, at once high and low-pitched—becomes a figure for a poetics that resists coherence, channelling the dissonant and the strange within the familiar. In a similar way, the practices brought together in Houred Time favour the speculative over the documentary, embracing a poetic urgency that seeks to imagine what could be, rather than merely recording what is.

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At the centre of Annika Eriksson’s artistic practice is an interest in social interaction: how do we live together, what kind of societies do we create, and what happens at the margins or in the transition from one order to another? Her projects recurrently engage with relations between humans and other animals—of our interdependence, slippages and connection, but also registers of violation and disregard. She has exhibited since the early 1990s, including the biennales of Istanbul, Venice, São Paulo, and Shanghai, and in institutions such as Bonner Kunstverein; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Tate Liverpool; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Hayward Gallery, London; and Moderna Museet, Malmö, and Stockholm, amongst others.

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was the partnerships coordinator then deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut.

Jules Reidy makes song cycles which abstractly deal with devotional love, transcendence and death of the self. They use materials such as guitars, voice, percussion, and found sounds, deconstructing, and augmenting them through non-standard tuning systems, polyrhythmic structures, electronic processing, and spatialisation. They aim to express and invoke states of uncanniness, dissociation, dys/euphoria, imagination, and void. They have recently released music on Thrill Jockey, Black Truffle, Shelter Press, Editions Mego, and Longform Editions and performed in live contexts such as CTM Festival, Unsound, Big Ears, Primavera, and ReWire. Their current collaborations include projects with Judith Hamann, Ivan Cheng, and Andrea Belfi.

September Sessions was initiated in 2023 by art organisations Index and Mint with an ambition to celebrate the diversity of the Stockholm art scene and to create a platform for international curators, temporarily transforming the city with programs at new and unexpected places. The four-day festival presents exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings and social gatherings, this year hosted by the local organisations Accelerator, Beau Travail, Bonniers Konsthall, Filmform, IASPIS, Index, Konsthall C, Liljevalchs, MEGA Foundation and MDT. Alongside these events, the festival presents Houred Time at Mint, Antics, Folkets Bio Zita, and Cues, curated by anorak.