TIME BEYOND PLACE is a cross-cultural all women’s art community initiated by Anne Katrine Senstad in 2016. Senstad’s platform sought to foster cross cultural practices focused on women artists living in gender-marginalized societies, through engaging with site-specificity, land art, domains of vernacular architecture, and temporality of spatial interventions in the public realm. Senstad created the platform in 2016 to 2017, focused on the Asiri region of southern Saudi Arabia. The project was commissioned by The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture as part of the first artist exchange program of the country. TIME BEYOND PLACE has been presented at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and at The Mosaic Rooms in London.
The initial establishment of TIME BEYOND PLACE – as an east-west cross-cultural research laboratory and art production initiative for and by women artists – was created, conceived and initiated by Anne Katrine Senstad in Southern Saudi Arabia in February 2016. The project took place in two parts with numerous female participants, and ended in 2017, A resulting short film on the project with the same title has been exhibited in galleries and film festivals in Norway and Mexico. The short film’s sound is by composer JG Thirlwell.
TIME BEYOND PLACE – THE CULTURAL BRIDGE – a commission by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, with additional support from Office for Contemporary Art Norway, was created as an open, international, and intercultural platform and meeting of traditional Saudi women’s artisanal art practices married with new contemporary art practices of Saudi women artists. The initiative highlights women’s art practices throughout time, where the roots of artisinial craft and architectural domains are re-interpreted into contemporary art practices such as installation art, performance art, sculpture, photography, film, and technology based art.
Time Beyond Place – The Cultural Bridge 2016 – Senstad, assisted by curator Nadine El-Khoury, and the local Asiri women artists collaborated on traditional Qut wall painting in the village of Abha in the Asiri region of southern Saudi Arabia, time-adjacent with old ruins containing historic Qut paintings going back 600 + years. Qut is a women only tradition that consists of geometric patterns as narrative documentaiton of family lineages, and as protection, covering entire interiors of houses found in the Asir region and northern Yemen, a cultural tradition that pre-dates the Islamic era, and also found in the traditional built environment of various cultures on the African continent. Senstad’s own project as part of the platform, TEXTILE TOPOGRAPHY was part of the all-women’s art platform TIME BEYOND PLACE, and is a series of sculptural site-specific textile interventions that also include intersecting traditional tribal Asiri textiles into nature as narrative space , rural environment, and the lived landscape. The textiles refer to the artisinal tradition of Asiri weaving , which is also performed by women only, where the textiles symbolically demonstrate protection and repair of the Asiri stone and clay ruins, as well as the interior Qut paintings, a gesture to uphold cultural heritage and the value of the folkloric narration as cultural memory code.
Time Beyond Place – The Cultural Bridge 2017 – Senstad produced new art works for the second year of the platform, expanding on the TEXTILE TOPOGRAPHY body of work, as well as created new artwork in collaboration with three invited Saudi women artist: Jameelah Mater, a traditional Qut painter who created new work using natural materials such as honey and home-made pigment, and two internationally established Saudi contemporary artists: performance artist Ghada Da who for this project worked with the entropic architectural space for her performance interventions, and sculptor, earth and installation artist Dr Zahrah Al Ghamdi, who later went on the represent her country in the Venice Biennale (2019), the first ever Saudi national pavilion. The TIME BEYOND PLACE initiative’s focus aimed at raising awareness to the preservation of cultural heritage and architecture while honoring the little-known history of women artisans of the Asir region, but as an initiative, it was a feministic platform, that aimed to reclaim the public sphere for women, and alter the conservative perception of women in the public realm, while respecting local customs and culture.
Capitalism in the Public Realm 