Texts, written and sung, anchor “I reached inside myself through time” (2015), a multi-media installation work by Dennis McNulty specially commissioned for the group exhibition LIAF 2015: Disappearing Acts, curated by Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen. McNulty’s installation has its origins in a chance encounter with an autographed image of Morten Harket, singer with Norwegian pop band A-ha, while on a site visit to Svolvær, a town in the remote and rugged Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway where LIAF (Lofoten International Art Festival) takes place biannually.

An acapella of A-ha’s smash hit “The sun always shines on TV”, lyrics split and meanings mutated, is employed as material in “I reached inside myself through time”. Harket’s singing voice journeys unaccompanied through the dry-docks, tunnels and sports halls of Lofoten’s childhoods and workdays before finally spilling into the gallery’s reflective geometries.

“Believe me, the mirror’s sending me through time.”

Meanwhile, text spools continuously from a horizon-line bisecting a screen-object suspended from above. Harvested from sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon’s wildly ambitious plan for his novel ”Last and First Men” (1930), these words and phrases plot a time-line spanning billions of years from EARTH FORMED to SECOND SOLAR CATASTROPHE.

In an exhibition space reconfigured by McNulty to resemble something akin to a geological remnant built of foil-backed plasterboard and other common building materials, Harket’s embodiment of a specific global pop-cultural moment and Stapledon’s geological and cosmic time-scales rhyme with and repel each other. Time telescopes backwards and forwards from this place, deforming and destabilising any sense of the present.