2018

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus was published on the first day of 1818. The iconic novel, which was ahead of its time, explored the relationship between the technological ethos and human ethos through the figure of an undead monster spawned by the new science – an immortal creature composed of human and animal body parts, doomed to a life of loneliness, suffering, and torment. 2018 is a weekly year planner and an artist’s book by the artist Maya Attoun, celebrating the bicentennial of Frankenstein with a signed and numbered edition of 2018 copies.
Its publication will be accompanied by various events that will take place throughout 2018, each casting a different light on the principles of continuity and change that stand at the core of the project. The planner, divided into 12 months and 57 weeks, includes 160 pages consisting of 80 double spreads of pencil drawings. Attoun’s elaborate drawings are imbued by movement that is closely linked with the perception of time and the prominence of speed in our era. They contain a constant tension between movement and pause/suspension: the time that each drawing has taken to complete (8 hours, a day, 3 days, a week) gains added significance in an object that has a limited shelf life of one year. Using the planner, or browsing through it as an artist book, is tantamount to time travel – between the transience of the present and the timelessness of the artwork. The experience of movement is embodied in the linear time continuum, as well as in the drawn fragments, frozen scenes, and still situation that hold infinite movement.