Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s Pendulums of Presence Teach Us Patience

Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s first museum exhibition in the US at the MIT List Visual Arts Center rewards the attentive viewer with a powerful and poetic observation on time, and the coexistence of beauty and isolation in the modern human experience. Gómez-Egaña, a Colombian artist currently living in Oslo, Norway, is trained as a musician and composer. He takes the name of “The Great Learning” from the avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, drawing from Cardew’s experiments with pedagogy and the Scratch Orchestra as a form of making. The Scratch Orchestra, an experimental music ensemble working from 1969 to 1974 in London, focused on the “action” of making music, ideas of duration, and sound versus silence. “The Great Learning” echoes these themes through the use of “Orchestrators” and both formal and conceptual elements.

Great Year (2025), located in the entry gallery, is a projected grid of twenty-three circles using cut-out animation to track the sun’s and moon’s orbital movements over the exhibition’s twenty-three-week duration. A small wooden disc affixed to the wall is moved each week by a gallery assistant who will change the display to reflect the current position of the sun and moon in the sky overhead—this is just one of many tasks the gallery’s staff are expected to complete as Orchestrators in the exhibition. The work prompts viewers to become acutely aware of their precise location—Cambridge, MA, Earth—while also drawing attention to the continuous passage of time through our shifting relationship to the universe above, specifically invoking the zenith in astronomy: the point directly overhead that anchors our orientation to the celestial sphere.

The gallery to the right is an entirely red room: red carpet, red fabric–wrapped benches, red walls—perhaps a little Lynchian in tone—holding individual works. Multiple elements of orchestrated movement and sound fill the room. One such work is The Ask (2025), which consists of three pendulums hitting against the wall in a slow and steady rhythm reminiscent of a clock ticking or a heart beating. The Orchestrators intermittently pause and restart the work, interrupting the repetition with moments of silence. The gentleness of the sound and delicate touch of the pendulum to the wall recalls for me the long running sentences of Proust’s epic novel In Search of Lost Time (1913). Gómez-Egaña, like Proust, is not in a rush to communicate his content and reflections on time. They seem to be kindred in Proust’s message: “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.”

The Great Learning (2025), sharing its title with the exhibition, is an elaborate installation involving a large copper rod hinged to the floor, set in a vertical position by an Orchestrator. The rod’s weight is meticulously balanced with a collection of various counterweights that slowly release from each other as the rod falls. Subtle variations in the length of falling time, approximately an hour, occur due to the effect of humidity and air pressure changes in the room on the monofilaments that the weights are attached to. To fully experience the work, the viewer needs to sit with stillness, stop rushing, and instead simply be present and observe the work, monumental in scale and sedate in action. As one remains with the piece, the sound of the pendulums sinks deeper into the psyche. The hidden electromagnets guide the pendulums’ steady motion in defiance of and in tandem with gravity, asking the viewer to reflect on their own relationship with time, gravity, and celestial bodies—binding the viewer to the work and the work to the viewer.

The second gallery is entirely dedicated to Virgo (2022), a large set-like installation involving twenty-eight wall partitions divided into two sections. Viewers can walk along the sides or through a central corridor. In appearance, the sliced space represents a typical rental apartment with neutral walls and familiar furniture, with all the rooms of a home—living room, bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom—lacking any distinguishable items. Virgo takes its name from the constellation as well as the Parthenon, which was dedicated to the virgin Greek goddess Athena Parthenos. Its architecture, like the artwork, is made of repeating forms and techniques that create optical illusions. The partitions of Virgo have square openings throughout, allowing the viewer to see inside and through the various walls at one time. This causes aspects of the work to disappear and reappear based on the viewer’s location and the way the work is activated.

Orchestrators slowly move a metal frame with various objects and furniture through each section, causing the rooms to visually overlap and pass by. The experience is something akin to riding an elevated train and watching the buildings slide by, little slices and slivers of other people’s lives both familiar and distant from our own. The fact that this is human orchestrated rather than mechanical matters. Orchestrators, mostly unseen due to the fragmented space, repeat the action often. Their rhythms vary and their timing is irregular, bringing an essential human presence into the work. Details in the “rooms” include an iPhone with fragments of Annie Dillard’s 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” scrolling across the screen; a TV plays starlings in their swooping, circling communal flight; a laptop navigates a geological map of a site at the Sahara and plays fragments of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Subtle but present, the twelve ceiling lights in the gallery shift as they simulate the sun’s arc from dawn to dusk. Virgo’s austere white space and repeating wall clocks as well as the vastness of the gallery contemplates the loneliness and isolation of modern life through the empty domestic space, the passing nature of our movement in urban environments, and the interconnectedness we can all experience through nature, technology, literature, music, and sight.

With the exhibition occupying all three main galleries, each space remains visually distinct. Yet, across all the works, there is a shared interrogation of how we learn and process concepts of the universe—our place within it, the passage of time, the resonance of sound, and the layered experience of duration. The work is experiental and though Gómez-Egaña is looking at vast references, the viewer’s knowledge of this is unnecessary in order to be transformed by the work and have its effects linger for a long time after. “The Great Learning”  is incredibly powerful and poetic. I meandered through the rooms for over an hour and a half and the work continues to prod me to ponder questions of time and existence in a way that is emotionally resonant. 

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“Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning” is on view through July 27 at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge.