we turn to time is a four-channel, immersive film installation that culminates my larger work Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place. The film is an intimate study of the family unit, with a focus on mixed-race American families. Inspired by the legacy of home movies, the film’s footage consists of collected new, self-documented video footage of families. The film features four multi-generational families from different parts of the United States: the Carroll family (Twin Cities, MN), the Fethke family (Woodbury, NY), the Kumanomido family (St. Louis, MO), and the Puligandla family (Los Angeles, CA). Each family contributed footage from two days of gathering, including birthday parties, holidays, or simple family dinners. The film is viewed as a four-channel immersive installation that runs on a loop.

we turn to time borrows from the visual language of family home movies and photo albums to capture the profound and everyday nature of mixed race families. Throughout American history, the mixed race body is usually presented either as a disaster (see: the figure of the tragic mulatto, narratives around the violence of passing, etc.), or as a kind of magic (see: serious journalistic features about hybridity as an evolutionary asset, or the common statement “mixed babies are the most beautiful”). we turn to time resists the binaries of tragic/magic, choosing instead to engage with the idea of mixture as fundamentally American.

The film is the discovery and presentation of an archive that I could not easily find: that quintessential form of nostalgic visual culture, the family home movie, featuring visibly mixed race, intergenerational families throughout the United States. I commissioned each family to document themselves as if they were not imagining any outside audience. The edited final result is a blend of tenderness, happiness, humor, touch, domesticity, hosting, performance, and celebration that narratively inserts itself into a national conversation about who we are, and who we could be.

Started in its research phase in 2018, we turn to time was completed in 2024, thanks to support from Recess, Art Matters, NYU’s Future Imagination Collaboratory, and the Kupferberg Arts Incubator.