On Kawara : One Million Years (Past and Future)

In resonance with the exhibition “Minimal,” the Bourse de Commerce presents One Million Years (Past and Future) by On Kawara, a work that reflects on the passage of time and its measurement.

In the Auditorium, visible through the glass separating it from the Foyer, a female and a male reader take turns reading a single year. All readings of One Million Years follow the same protocol devised by the – counting slowly from the past toward the present, or from the present into the future. Each reading picks up where the previous one left off and continues until all volumes have been read aloud in their entirety.

In these books, a human lifespan corresponds to just a few lines, and the entire history of humanity to a few pages. Past is dedicated “to all those who have lived and died,” and Future “to the last one.”

One Million Years is a set of twenty-four works: twelve trace the millennia of the past, and twelve explore the millennia to come. Titled respectively One Million Years: Past (covering the years 998,031 BCE to 1969 CE) and One Million Years: Future (covering the years 1980 to 1,001,980 CE), each work consists of ten binders, totaling two thousand pages of text. To create One Million Years, On Kawara developed a collage method: columns of numbers were glued onto grids of numbers that had already been typed. The final sheets were then photocopied to conceal the glued areas, inserted into transparent plastic sleeves, and stored in individual boxed volumes.

In 1993, On Kawara expanded the project to include public readings, live or recorded, allowing the work to be both preserved and perpetuated through recitation. Since then, One Million Years has been the subject of numerous readings around the world. Each reading follows a precise protocol devised by the artist: readers appear in pairs, with a male-identifying reader reading odd-numbered dates and a female-identifying reader reading even-numbered dates. Readers who do not identify as male or female may choose which set of dates they wish to read.