A Dutch Artist Travels Through Time and Its Colonial Past

The larger context of this inquiry is Ms. Pisano’s interest in colonialism and racism and how they play out in aspects of life that we tend to consider neutral, like mathematics, time and language. She became interested in the subject after reading an article advocating the removal of racist connotations in mathematics education — particularly in the kinds of equations that appeared in textbooks.

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Before, Ms. Pisano had thought of mathematics as a relatively pure abstract language, free of cultural values. But as she did more research, speaking to anthropologists and reading critical theory, she found that even math was loaded with colonial ideas. The work she developed, “The Value of Mathematics,” included an imagined conversation involving the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the author and amateur mathematician Lewis Carroll and his character Alice, as well as sculptures, diagrams and a film.

Her latest work, “Wonder-What-Time-It-Is,” is based on “The Devil in the Belfry,” a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is set in a fictional, isolated small town called Vondervotteimittiss, where homes are arranged in a circle around a central square containing a clock tower. The residents, all of Dutch descent, set their own clocks to the ringing of the bells, until one day a devilish out-of-towner attacks the belfry man and disrupts the clock.

In her performance, Ms. Pisano stands inside a sculptural structure in the form of an X, which holds diagrams and illustrations. She reads Poe’s text and stops occasionally to verbally annotate it with commentary about the historical context of the story, and standardized time and tales about those who opposed it.

“I’m waiting to see it, and I think it will be a very important moment in the fair this year,” said Jennifer Flay, the FIAC director. “If it can shift the boundaries, which I think it does, that’s very important, because that’s what we’re trying to do at FIAC.”

“Wonder-What-Time-It-Is” will be presented in the rotunda of the Petit Palais during the fair, one of 90 outdoor projects and 20 indoor performances that are part of a program that FIAC has been developing since 2009. “Artists have always been confronting sociological realities, and we at FIAC are particularly interested in this kind of work,” Ms. Flay said. “I’m very open to more formalist approaches too, but it’s true that FIAC does give a place to artists who work in this way.”

Ms. Pisano didn’t always think she would become an artist. After studying sculpture at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, she worked for three years as an assistant at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, which now represents her. She thought she might become an art writer or critical theorist, and attended the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where she was encouraged to study fine arts instead of art theory. When she first presented her ideas in a kind of lecture, her teachers decided that she was an artist instead.

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“I read my proposal, but people perceived it as a work of art,” she recalled. “The form that I had found — even though I did not try to achieve any form — somehow fell into a place that was considered art.”

She calls her form of art “research-based installation,” which means that she does a lot of reading on a particular subject and then develops a poetic and sculptural way of expressing what she has learned. She tends to mull over a single theme for several years, and to make it the source of a series of works that meditate on that subject matter.

Ms. Pisano’s fascination with her subject matter may have something to do with the fact that her maternal grandmother’s family came from Indonesia, which used to be a Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. They called themselves Indos, she said, or Eurasians who were of mixed Indonesian and European descent.

“My grandfather was in the Dutch Army, and when they came to the Netherlands in the 1950s they had what they called ‘a very quiet integration,’” she said. “It was a lot about adapting. They already identified as being Dutch, but when they got here it was very important to be Dutch Dutch. I don’t know if this has to do with my interest in these subjects, but anyway I’m interested in how history and political and social situations have an effect on people, and culture and community.”

Ms. Pisano reads a lot, and in a conversation about her work she referred to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Toward a Global Idea of Race,” Johannes Fabian’s “Time and the Other” and Silvia Federici’s “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its Others,” heady scholarly works that dive deep into the theoretical basis of colonial oppression. But she said that it was the world that affected her most — the way she sees racism and colonial mentalities rearing their heads again across Europe and the United States.

“I came to the conclusion that it’s very difficult to imagine change within the thought structures that are there,” she said. “It’s important to look at other cultures that might have other propositions to imagine the world differently, and also to look at what makes the thought structures we have so solid or so enduring, and so tough to break.”

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