ABSTRACT
This chapter responds to Victor Burgin’s call for another time conception for “a radical questioning of History’s status as the one story of Western progress and culture,” by interpreting his A Place to Read along with artists and architects that the work stimulates. While thinking about alternative time conceptions for the accomplishment of a global history of art and architecture, the chapter traces the intertwined stories of translations across time, space, and medium that ended in Istanbul, including the albums of Armenian photographer studio Abdullah Frères during the Ottoman period and the buildings of Turkish architect Sedad Eldem during the Early Republic. It analyzes the cyclical structure of Burgin’s video loops as open narratives that operate in nonlinear, fragmented or overlapping times of the human subject with out-of-phase durations or overlapping histories.
