Real-Time
Curated by Petia Mihaylova, with an accompanying essay by Elliott Burns
4th – 30th July 2026
Cable Depot, Sofia, BG
Pause, rewind, freeze, return. Start again. From the beginning.
To live in real-time is to live among systems we did not build, memories we cannot fully hold, and materials still carrying the weight of what came before. In Real-Time, Bob Bicknell-Knight brings these systems together in a single room and turns them toward us. It is a present layered and accumulated, shaped by our wish to control movement, memory, and time itself. Pause, rewind, freeze, return. Start again, this time from the middle.
The present here is never offered as a clean slate. Instead, several unfinished times run at once, competing to show themselves through the cracks in our concrete. Things stay in use long after they fail and remain in charge as they come apart, their original purpose forgotten long ago. Bicknell-Knight’s work begins with these ordinary systems but never leaves them as neutral background. They set the terms of our days, shape how we move, remember, and measure time. Each work is pulled loose from a larger machine, its function stripped away until only memory remains.
Routine (2025) exists between three layers of time. First, its shape is borrowed from a UK plug-in timer Bicknell-Knight’s mother kept in his childhood home. After bringing it to Estonia in 2024, he found the appliance had lost its function and only the memory remained. The second layer consists of three candles set around the disc, marking the exact time of the artist’s birth: 11:50pm. At the center sits a third – a clock taken from a video game. Frozen, modified, stretched, and painted onto the canvas, the image warped the way time itself warps in a game world. Together, these layers hold a fabricated, frozen time while the candles around the edge refuse it. Lit and replaced as they burn down across the run of the show, they turn the work into a working timepiece. One that insists real-time cannot be paused, rewound, frozen, or returned.
From the personal, the exhibition scales to the shared. Like the timer in Routine, the railway bridge from Track (2026) is a system for ordering time. The railway is where time first became standardized – what we now feel as neutral, even natural, was installed to dictate direction, speed, and movement. Made to go unnoticed and to hold beyond thought, it becomes reflex and memory until its time is indistinguishable from our own. Fabricated time made invisible. The control that begins in one household returns here as shared infrastructure no one can opt out of. As the railway’s mechanized time pauses like a video game clock, candles once again burn along the edges to remind us that real-time will always seep through.
Underneath everything runs a sound sealed into the concrete floor. Felt before it is found, its source is a memory – the noise of a nuclear plant driven into the ground near the coastline where Bicknell-Knight grew up. It is the sound of power being made and of a landscape broken to make it. Buried beneath the floor we stand on, it keeps working as these systems always do. Out of sight, underfoot, felt long before we think to look for its source.
Bicknell-Knight works with familiar objects – a timer, a railway bridge, a sound with no clear source – to remind us that broken systems can last beyond their purpose and still control us. It is a condition this city understands well. Keeping anything alive here has always meant working with systems that are outdated yet in charge, broken but still shaping our days. Each piece in Real-Time has outlived its use, designed to operate differently and retain only the memory of its past role. Memory, it turns out, builds the present. Walking through the exhibition means moving through time set for us before we arrived.
Pause, rewind, freeze, return. Start again. But not from the beginning.
Petia Mihaylova
Photos by Yana Lozeva
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“Ever since relocating to Tallinn, Bob Bicknell-Knight’s artworks have become increasingly preoccupied with the question of time and how its passage is experienced within video games. For several years a recurrent staple of his artistic methodology has been the exploration of levels as scenographic arenas, often walking through digital forests and urban sprawls out of which photographic compositions can be framed. His choice documentary artefacts will then undergo further post-production stages, adding elements and distorting the surface into lucid paint strokes reminiscent of the early days of AI image dreaming. Before the now brushstroked scenes are manufactured as printed canvases and finished with manually painted edges. Yet Tallinn has tightened Bicknell-Knight’s eye and taken the artist’s virtual wanderings inside“
Excerpt from Parts Per Minute: on the very slow erasure of game-time, a commissioned essay for the exhibition written by Elliott Burns.
INCLUDED ARTWORKS
