This exhibition explores different dimensions and scales of time, from the universal to the personal and from the cellular to the geological, even the astronomical. Time can be seen as simultaneously binding us, through heredity, and separating us, by death, across generations. And then at the smallest, quantum scale, time seems to mock us, by behaving illogically and entangling all matter over vast distances.

The arts have long embraced time through forms like video and performance or, in the case of much bio art and design, explored it through birth, growth, rot, decay, and the cycles of whole ecological systems. With many of the works in the exhibition, time and life are examined simultaneously, acknowledging our human limitation of a lifetime, taking stock of our collective impact, and also gazing in awe at the immensity of what has come before and what will, inevitably, follow us all.

Life Time presents the winning projects of the Bio Art and Design Award 2017, developed in collaboration with leading Dutch researchers in the life sciences, alongside several recent works that share a focus on the theme of time. The works reflect on, demonstrate, or even contest advances in life sciences research. They also probe time and life in the realms of the oceans, under the earth, in our minds, and in our cells.