The Gifted Time of Timsam Harding
Waiting is becoming friends with the paradox
-Andrea Köhler
Just a few meters from here, more than a million vehicles pass by every day. Every single day. 365 million travellers pass every year along the road with the highest traffic density in Spain and one of the most congested in all of Europe. The echo of a constant noise slips in through one of the small windows of the room that serves as kitchen-bedroom-office-refuge for Timsam Harding, who has spent his whole life playing with the idea of the road, movement stretched across time and space, rubber and asphalt, the paradox between a love of stillness and a fascination with transit.
Timsam Harding (Málaga, 1992) offers a coffee and sits in one of the two chairs arranged on the attic-like upper floor of a warehouse converted into a workshop and refuge on the outskirts of Vallecas, right by the M30. He speaks with the determination and pause of someone who spends much more time thinking than speaking, because Timsam believes the work should be the one to speak, his work, the work he does every day on a street full of car workshops, scrapyards, and warehouses from where a rave bursts out almost every night. And in that tumult, Harding constructs a haven where poligonero aesthetics coexist with Philip Glass, where raw skids on asphalt collide with the cotton-soft melodies of Nils Frahm, with Kiasmos samples and the roar of an angle grinder on a cold autumn morning in Madrid.
From that noise, Harding has composed an exhibition like an invisible score, an archipelago of “listening islands” arriving amid the frenzy of a cultural center that organises more than three hundred activities a year, turning a place of passage into a place of pause, a runway where the flurry of daily obligations becomes, at least for a moment, the possibility simply to be. A tiempo para la espera (In time for waiting) is the title, evocative, like all of Harding’s work, of the in-house exhibition now presented by La Térmica, the contemporary culture center of the Provincial Council of Málaga.
A tiempo para la espera offers a carefully distilled overview of Harding’s artistic path to date. His recurring themes appear -asphalt, the road, transit, critical reflections on urban movement…- but here their formal and conceptual treatment takes a new twist, moving toward a kind of stripping-down, a search for essentiality that leaves behind any desire for material heaviness in favor of a crucial impression created through an increasingly rigorous economy of means.
In Bajo la rueda, sobre el asfalto (Under the Tire, Over the Asphalt) (Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Málaga, 2020), Harding used, alongside his early ventures into photography and video, pieces made of rubber, metal and molten lead, materials that gave considerable physical density to his aesthetic reflection on travel. At that time, his work could be linked to approaches by Richard Serra, Harald Szeemann, Robert Smithson or Rosalind Krauss 1. The next stop on this journey would come two years later in the Sala Santa Inés in Seville, as part of the Junta de Andalucía’s Iniciarte program. There Harding presented the exhibition 28 m/s, where the time/space equation took center stage from the title itself, the distance a body travels when moving at 100 km/h 2: 28 meters per second. Everything there became less declarative, lighter; those double-V sculptures made from guardrail sections salvaged from roadsides appeared alongside the growing prominence of sound, not just as a sonic backdrop, but as a vibrating activator of a process that was leading Harding into a joyful exploration of sound sculpture.
Harding’s work thus fits within the genealogy of creators who, since the early 20th century, have questioned the role of sound beyond music, treating it instead as artistic material in its own right 3. Yet it wasn’t until the second half of the century that the conceptual development of “sound art” matured through inquiries that expanded the boundaries of music, listening, and space, led by composers such as John Cage 4 or Morton Feldman 5, whose pieces, both philosophical and multifaceted, opened a radical breach by proposing music as a perceptual experience rather than a compositional one.
A decisive evolution would be represented by Max Neuhaus, considered by many the “father of sound installation.” Neuhaus did not simply bring sound into exhibition spaces: he projected sound into the public realm. His emblematic work Times Square (1977) consisted of a continuous sonic drone placed beneath a grate at a Manhattan intersection, evoking deep bells that transformed the everyday experience of passersby, redefining sound as a way of inhabiting an environment.
Harding’s work -like that of many contemporary artists working with sound- situates his practice within that foundational tradition. Neuhaus’s shift toward “sound as space” finds an echo in Harding, who uses environmental vibrations, resonances and frictions (traffic, the city, metallic materials) to transform them into perceptual experiences. In parallel, Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of expanded listening -the idea that any sound can be music and that conscious attention transforms aesthetic experience- aligns naturally with Harding’s intention to turn the everyday into an artistic subject.
Thus Harding’s work can be understood as part of a continuity: it gathers the lessons of the pioneers of sound art (Cage, Neuhaus, Oliveros) but reinterprets them through a contemporary field-based investigation (urban, spatial, physical) that transforms invisible vibrations into audible art. His approach updates the materiality and spatiality of sound -as in the work of Neuhaus or the Spanish artist Vicens Vacca- within a contemporary production framework, exploring tensions between noise, landscape, body and space, inviting a critical, active, transformative listening.
This invitation to “transformative listening” marked a new milestone in Sin silencio, developed in the summer of 2024 at the Genalguacil Art Encounters and selected by the biennial organisers and La Térmica for the development of a solo exhibition at the contemporary culture center of the Provincial Council of Málaga. A tiempo para la espera draws inspiration from the “spirit of Genalguacil,” a Museum Town for over three decades, and expands into unconventional exhibition spaces in the institution’s historic former Casa de la Misericordia. Just as artworks take over the streets and squares of the Genal Valley, Harding’s sculptures now occupy an unprecedented exhibition space that is the first-floor gallery of our historic building.
On the century-old hydraulic tiles, between the corridor windows that once sheltered the wounded of the Franco-Moroccan War and hundreds of orphans of the province, Harding installs lightweight, almost weightless “listening islands” made from steel chairs and structures, covered with branches and leaves made from aluminium. Oleander leaves, that tough and poisonous plant capable of growing along road shoulders and ditches without care that Harding has taken as metaphorical material by submerging them into clay-sand blocks mixed with oil to create a silver vegetation like a bullet, like the edge of a trembling blade vibrating with the hidden speakers lodged in metal structures.
Everything seems cold, surgical but nothing could be further from the truth. Random sounds. People speaking underwater, the noise of traffic, the tinkling of falling rain, the faint whistle of blowing across a bottle. A soundtrack nourished by minimalism and electronic music, by John Cage and midweek afters hour clubs in an industrial estate on the outskirts. But here the invitation moves in the opposite direction: stop, listen, feel. Feel that we are “in time for waiting”. After all, “waiting is our first cultural act,” 6 the early murmur capable of crystallizing into thought and intellectual expression, as Andrea Köhler writes in Passing Time, a book that has hovered over Harding’s artistic practice in recent years and whose title seems to merge like those aluminum oleander leaves with the ultimate purpose of this exhibition: Harding’s desire to gift us time, and space, to stop, close our eyes, breathe, feel the vibration of what surrounds us. And listen.
Antonio Javier López
Director of La Térmica
1. Rosado, P. (2020). Bajo la rueda, sobre el asfalto. University of Málaga.
2. Sánchez Martínez, J. (2022). Desde la boca del túnel. Apuntes sobre arte conceptual automovilístico a partir de la obra de Timsam Harding. Junta de Andalucía.
3. Russolo, L. (2020). El arte de los ruidos. La música futurista. Casimiro.
4. Cage, J. (2002). Silencio: conferencias y escritos. Ardora Ediciones.
5. Feldman, M. (2012). Pensamientos verticales. Caja Negra Editora.
6. KÖHLER, A. (2018). El tiempo regalado. Un ensayo sobre la espera. Libros del Asteroide.