SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions reflects on the ways that artists have responded to the evolving conditions of the 21st century. Composed of work by 40 artists, the exhibition broadly considers the fluidity of ideas and how artworks embody time. The installation, which highlights recent acquisitions and works on view to the public for the first time, calls attention to the varied forms and approaches taken by different artists and the connections between the personal, the intimate and the individual; constructions of identity, history and culture; the instability of materials; and strategies to rediscover or recover the past.

The title phrase is taken from art historian George Kubler’s seminal book The Shape of Time (1962), in which the author proposes a history of “things”—including artworks—that traces connected ideas developed in sequence, sometimes over centuries and with intervening deviations and lapses. Through ideas, artworks are affected by their historical context and, in turn, affect it.

“By considering the complex and often contradictory continuum of the past 16 years, A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions brings together profound meditations on equality, loss, desire, migration, materiality and the everyday,” said Jenny Gheith, exhibition curator and assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA. “We see artists creating ambitious installations in non-traditional materials such as sand and grass alongside quiet reflections that mark the passage of time.”

Representing a range of approaches and media—including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, film, video and performance—A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions features a dynamic cross-section of contemporary art. Beginning with a performance work by Tino Sehgal in Helen and Charles Schwab Hall and continuing to unfold through a series of seventh-floor galleries organized according to shared formal and conceptual affinities, the exhibition is punctuated by monographic installations by Lutz Bacher, Trisha Donnelly, Dora García and Emily Jacir. Other highlights of the exhibition include works by artists Tauba Auerbach, Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Colter Jacobsen, Mark Manders, as well as Sam Lewitt, Paulina Olowska, Catherine Opie, Walid Raad and Danh Vo, among others.