Some may be puzzled by an exhibition titling itself ‘Thenabouts’. As a portmanteau, the word seems confusingly to displace time onto space. The term was in fact neologised by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939), where a character asks, ‘Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?’ Joyce coined such seemingly nonsensical terms as ‘thenabouts’ and ‘anywhen’ to conflate temporal and spatial schemas. Rather than accepting each dimension as objectively discrete, Joyce performed a metaphorical inversion as a gesture towards conceiving such categories as elastic, paradoxical, and inextricably linked constructions.

French artist and filmmaker Philippe Parreno borrows Joyce’s term because, like Joyce, he too is drawn to paradoxical conjunctions of time and space. Following on the heels of Parreno’s site-specific installation Anywhen at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which opened in October 2016 and continues until April 2017, Parreno’s current exhibition at ACMI in Melbourne presents a selection of twenty-eight of Parreno’s films. Running between one to thirty-eight minutes in length, the films screen back-to-back in unpredictable sequences decided each day by the ACMI ground staff, re-threading the thematic and aesthetic correspondences.