Time Heals, Just Not Quick Enough... brings together contemporary works in film and photography to explore the slow, fragmented, and often nonlinear processes of healing, memory, and transformation. These mediums–each inherently attuned to time–are employed not merely as tools of documentation, but as poetic instruments of reflection. The moving image, fluid and unfolding, captures time in motion; the still photograph, by contrast, arrests it in a single frame. These distinct modes of seeing offer complementary perspectives: one continuous, the other punctuated. Together, they echo the rhythms of memory, grief, resilience, and hope.

Rather than presenting time as a fixed or neutral backdrop, the exhibition approaches it as an active, volatile force–one that disrupts, lingers, accumulates, and resists closure. Time emerges not only as subject but as method: layered through archival material, invoked through personal and collective histories, and embedded in acts of refusal and repetition. Holding space for tensions–between visibility and opacity, rupture and repair, loss and renewal–the exhibition resists the urge for tidy conclusions. In a moment in history shaped by urgency, acceleration, and immediate gratification, this gathering of works insists on the importance of pause, of process, and of sitting with what remains unfinished.

Unfolding across themes of acceptance, communion, hope, love, and self-discovery, the exhibition is framed through the elastic lens of temporality. Each artist offers a visual narrative that underscores time’s capacity to shape, fracture, and mend the human experience. In their varied approaches–many of which diverge from the conventions of traditional photography–their works reflect generational shifts in how image-making engages memory and identity. This departure, shaped in part by the artists’ differing ages and contexts, challenges viewers to reckon with the slow, cyclical, and often nonlinear movements that define personal and collective evolution.

Collectively, these works do not offer a unified timeline. Instead, they come together to present a constellation of temporalities–some fragmented, some cyclical, others suspended or speculative. Each artist engages with time not as chronology but as texture: thick, uneven, felt. The archive reappears not as a static repository but as a living, reconfigurable material; repetition emerges not as stasis but as method, insistence, and return.

Samuel Fosso’s early self-portraits–captured during off-hours at his studio in Bangui–are intimate time capsules of postcolonial African youth culture. These images, playful yet deliberate, embody the exuberance of a newly independent generation. Fosso’s adolescent experiments with identity and style prefigure his future as a conceptual portraitist, and offer a powerful counter narrative to colonial modes of documentation. His work asserts the right to self-definition, performance, and imaginative freedom.

In Agua Viva, Abeer Sultan constructs a mythopoetic world where we witness a convergence of personal history, marine life, migration and fragmented heritage. Through collages, photographs, and moving images, she assembles speculative artefacts animated by the immortal jellyfish, corals, and shells–organic forms that evoke cycles of renewal, fragility, and ancestral memory. These recurring motifs embody an attention to a slow, submerged process of

healing that resists articulation. Inspired by Aimé Césaire’s ‘Notebook of a Return to My Native Land’, Sultan embraces opacity as a form of resistance–a refusal to be made fully visible, knowable, or fixed. In this refusal, she reclaims agency, crafting a visual language where the unseen and the intuitive assert themselves as valid modes of knowledge. Her work resonates with theorist Daphne Brooks’ assertion that “opacity is never an absence,” but a refusal–a strategy of presence. In collaboration with artist Sumaya Fallatah, whose portraiture of Sultan is embedded within the work, Agua Viva maps new cosmographies that unsettle linear histories and reveal the overlooked geographies and entangled diasporic routes across the Arab Peninsula.

Fallatah’s own contributions present a poignant meditation on migration, loss, and the elasticity of identity. Drawing on family photographs and traditional artistic practices, her layered collages on indigo-dyed textiles evoke the labor of cultural preservation. Fabric, here, becomes both medium and metaphor–a surface inscribed with memory and a site of resistance to historical erasure. Each stitch becomes a mnemonic gesture, preserving not only lineage but an embodied history. Her work mourns what was lost through assimilation, while affirming what endures: resilience, memory, and the desire to remain whole.

Kelani Abass continues the dialogue around memory, materiality, and intergenerational transmission, fusing personal history with broader reflections on time. Referencing practices learned from his father’s letterpress company, which operated in Nigeria from 1950 to 1990, Abass incorporates the tools and language of printmaking–particularly typecases and the technique of chasing, where letters are bound together to form printable texts. These printmaking elements function not just as formal devices, but as conduits to intergenerational knowledge and tactile memory. In Scrap of Evidence (Akaba), he weaves fragments of text from family archives–on healing and spiritual practices, and ancestral wisdom–into richly layered compositions. The work becomes both an elegy and an invocation: a space where memory is typeset, impression by impression, into the surfaces of history. Through repetition and layering, Abass transforms the mechanics of print into a poetic process of preservation and transmission, creating mnemonic topographies where presence is mapped through absence. His surfaces emerge as temporal palimpsests, where memory is neither linear nor fixed, but accumulative, recursive, and reanimated–a form of repair and resilience that reclaims a history and artistic practice at risk of fading.

In Aïda Muluneh’s work, time is mediated through emotional truth and symbolic composition, particularly in a series that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world grappled with the immediate realities of a new disease, Muluneh’s lens turned to the ongoing, often overlooked struggles posed by Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in Africa. These diseases, which disproportionately affect rural regions with limited access to medical care and clean water, disrupt not only individual health but also the broader trajectory of the nation's future. Through her vividly saturated, meticulously staged photographs, Muluneh constructs spaces where time is layered and emotional truths are foregrounded. Her images explore the quiet endurance, psychic strain, and an intimate strength of people affected by these conditions. In doing so, Muluneh’s images echo the exhibition’s emphasis on the slowness and complexity of healing–not only the physical recovery, but the psychological and cultural processes that unfold in its aftermath.

Engaging in themes of resilience and the unseen dimensions of care, Muluneh positions photography as both witness and intervention. Her images resist closure and linearity, holding space for ambiguity, introspection, and emotional continuity. As such, her work offers a narrative that insists on pausing with what is unresolved, on attending to the silences around suffering, and on art's capacity to reflect socio-political realities while illuminating the interior landscapes of the human condition.

time heals, just not quick enough... is a meditation on time’s rhythms, its ruptures, and its capacity for transformation. It invites us to reconsider our own temporalities: the moments we rush to and through, the silences we overlook, the histories we inherit, and the futures we dare to imagine. In embracing slowness, repetition, and ambiguity, the works on view remind us that healing and understanding rarely arrive on schedule. But if we pause–if we learn to wait–we may come to see time not as something to overcome, but as a companion in the ongoing work of becoming.

- Ose Ekore