carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce The Shadow Out of Time, Sebastián Díaz Morales’ ninth solo exhibition with the gallery and his second in Madrid.
The exhibition is part of this year’s Festival OFF of PHotoESPAÑA and will follow the artist’s institutional solo exhibition, El Cielo Cayendo, which opened at Arthaus, Buenos Aires, in 2025. It brings together distinct bodies of work that explore how traces of past and future civilisations persist in the present.
Borrowing its title from H.P. Lovecraft’s story of consciousness displaced across aeons, the exhibition reimagines the shadow not as a monster, but as the faint, persistent signal of a world that has ceased to be — a parallel reality or shifted timeline in which a world has quietly vanished elsewhere.
Each work in the exhibition does not depict an event, but rather the afterglow of an absence. In the artist’s words, each object functions as a receiver, a kind of tuning device.
Fragments Before Midnight (2025), one of Díaz Morales’ most recent video works, opens the circle of reception. A smartwatch, one of the most contemporary reading devices we own, glows on the wall, initially displaying the banal present: 10:00, June 11th, 2024. As the camera zooms inward, fragmented texts materialize. They are the oldest known human writings, cuneiform inscriptions from the cities of the Sumerian civilisation, among the earliest urban societies in human history. The texts are now pulsing across a wearable screen at the brink of collapse.
Chronos (2026) and Candle (2018-2019) emphasise the exhibition’s most direct engagement with time as a material. Chronos is a lightbox piece built for a single, impossible purpose: to stop an event and reverse time itself. A wristwatch revolves in space, its second hand fixed upward, moving backward, while the case rotates in opposition, freezing the hand in a gesture of refusal. For fifteen minutes, the device tries and fails, yet the attempt lingers. Candle, a sculptural video installation, offers a different register: a flame rotates 360 degrees over twenty minutes. Not flickering, but rotating. In the aftermath of a crisis — a dark space — the candle becomes both a source of light and a signal of systemic change. The ordinary object becomes eerie because the world around it is no longer the same. Together, these two works propose that time does not end; it becomes other: reversed, frozen, or simply turned sideways.
The last work featured in the exhibition is Tweeter for a Broken Speaker (2025), which shifts the register from text to sound. A visibly broken speaker carcass reproduces the calls of birds — some recognisable, others strange or unheard. It mimics what it once heard, becoming an archaeological artifact of a possible future. It is an echo of an alternative reality: a world that has gone silent elsewhere, yet still sings through a broken device.
Through The Shadow Out of Time, Díaz Morales does not reconstruct events but evokes their aftermath. The oldest known human texts arrive on a smartwatch. A broken speaker remembers birds that may no longer sing. A wristwatch freezes its second hand in a futile attempt to reverse time. A candle’s flame turns sideways. Rather than depicting endings, the exhibition focuses on persistence: the signal after civilisation, the echo after the event. What remains is not the event itself, but its trace. The exhibition lives in the space after the message and before the outcome.