Developed out of Rasheedah Phillips’s ongoing practice as a member of Black Quantum Futurism and their 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellowship project, the exhibition Time Zone Protocols and the accompanying Prime Meridian Unconference explore the “Protocol Proceedings,” that were developed at the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference (IPMC). They trace the creation of written and unwritten political and social agreements, protocols, and rules that underlie Westernized time constructs. Time Zone Protocols aims to illuminate the impacts that oppressive time protocols and policies have on marginalized Black communities in the US, and how they help to catalyze and perpetuate systems of oppression that deny Black communities access to and agency over the temporal domains of the past and present while proposing protocols for new, equitable futures.

The exhibition debuts three new clocks developed as part of Black Quantum Futurism’s Arts at CERN residency project, “CPT Symmetry and Violations,” and a nonlinear…