28/08/2025
We first met Miljohn Ruperto in the in-between moments—over breakfast, during cigarette breaks—at the Jakarta Biennale 2021. Our conversations drifted toward the many ways humans live alongside the non-human: KUNCI’s chicken, mushrooms, and our late beloved dog Chepas. Around that time, Miljohn, together with Erik Kim, presented The Time Machine (2021), a work that caught us with its subtle humor: an attempt to wrestle with the subject of time in the midst of a global standstill during the pandemic.
Four years later, that conversation picks up again. On the 30th of August, we welcome Miljohn back to share his ongoing explorations of time. In the turbulence of our present, Miljohn reminds us of another way to think about it, through kairos:
“The fatal or critical point for the body to receive a wound.”
This is how kairos appears in Homer’s Iliad. Yet as Miljohn notes, this is only one of its meanings. In this talk, Miljohn will open up several Ancient Greek conceptions of time—aion, chronos, and kairos—to sketch out an account of Western spatio-temporality.
We will trace aion, known as eternal time: an unbounded, unceasing expanse against which all other forms of time unfold. Then chronos, or historical and sequential time: linear, directional, what Miljohn also dubs modernity. And finally, kairos: a situational, context-aware time, like the way a hunter knows the right moment to strike. It describes the emerging temporality of the present.
Miljohn sees this talk as a postcolonial project: an effort to unsettle the totalizing force of Western spatio-temporality by making its operations visible. In doing so, this talk offers not just reflection but also a tool—to critically discern the influence of Western spatio-temporality on a case-by-case basis.
