Helena Eribenne imagined boarding a time machine in London in 1999, aiming for London in 1974, and arriving instead in Vienna. The year is still 1999, but the city feels older. Her character finds an Afro-textured hair salon and meets another Black woman whose reception in the city differs from her own. The premise grew into a performance she wrote, directed and acted in, When the World Comes to An End, Move to Vienna… Because Everything Happens There 20 Years Later!. Its time-travel joke carries a serious account of who is welcomed, who is marked as foreign and what it can mean to be displaced without ever having left Europe.
Eribenne is a London-born artist of Nigerian descent who has lived and worked in Vienna since 1999. She works across performance, film, photography, music and installation. In a 2025 first-person interview, she directly connected the play to her entry into Afrofuturism. She describes her practice as an effort to find a home beyond ordinary arrangements of time and space. That quest does not make geography disappear. Vienna’s streets, institutions and racial hierarchies give her time machine its force. The speculative journey leads her back to a place whose present can feel disturbingly out of step with her life.
The play’s salon is a particularly exact destination. Hair is both a material part of the body and a field of social judgment, especially for Black women in European cities. An Afro-textured hair salon can be a place to repair a style, exchange news and find forms of recognition unavailable elsewhere. Eribenne’s fictional traveller reaches such a space after a failed trip across time. The salon supplies an alternative kind of arrival: a community that makes a strange city more navigable, even if it cannot erase the inequalities outside its door.
An arrival that changes the clock
Eribenne said she had long tried to imagine entering old photographs and television programmes. As a child, she studied clothes, cars, colour and picture quality for clues to when an image had been made. Black-and-white photography made historical people seem distant to her, while colour film offered a different, though still incomplete, sense of access. This habit was not merely nostalgia. She wanted to know whether she could place herself in a time before her own birth and feel present there.
Moving to Vienna gave that private exercise a social dimension. In the Al-Tiba9 interview, she remembered the city’s slower services and older customs as if she had arrived in another decade. Some of that sensation amused her. Another part was painful. People treated her as a racialized outsider and redirected her identity toward an idea of Africa, even when she explained that she was from London. The city’s apparent temporal lag became a way of describing the persistence of attitudes that the surrounding society might have preferred to call past.
The 2016 performance is autobiographical in structure but uses fiction to change its scale. The attempted route to 1974 London and mistaken arrival in 1999 Vienna is not a literal travel claim. It is a stage mechanism that lets the audience experience the mismatch between calendar time and lived social time. A city can have modern technology and old categories of belonging at once. The speculative device makes that contradiction visible, and the salon gives it a human setting instead of leaving it as an abstract argument about progress.
Her artist biography records the play’s 2016 Vienna premiere under its longer title. That dated record matters because Eribenne has also spoken of later, still developing time-machine ideas. The performed play is a finished work; future interactive models remain ambitions. The existing performance already shows why time travel suits her art. It brings histories into the room without assuming the audience can observe them from a safe position outside their effects.
A performance that argues with an institution
In 2019, Eribenne received the H13 Performance Prize for Woman to Woman II. The Austrian broadcaster ORF’s report describes a musical, imagined dialogue between Eribenne and a white female curator. The work references Shirley Brown’s 1974 song Woman to Woman while turning the gallery into a time-machine setting for a critique of how women artists of colour are represented and received. Music is therefore more than accompaniment. It establishes a prior voice with which the new performance enters conversation.
The title’s second woman could suggest solidarity, but the staged relation is unequal. One participant is the artist whose work enters an institution; the other is a figure of institutional authority. Their dialogue asks what kinds of listening and interpretation a gallery permits. A curator can help bring an artist to an audience and can also frame her through expectations the artist did not choose. By placing these roles into a fictional exchange, Eribenne gives the usually quiet mechanisms of exhibition-making a speaking part.
The reference to 1974 also changes how the room handles time. An older song does not arrive as a historical footnote. It becomes a present resource for a performance about the continuing terms of recognition. The past is not revived for style alone. It is used to hear where an apparent conversation between women still contains a gap in power. The same formal move appears in Eribenne’s Vienna play: a date can be exact while the social problem it carries refuses to stay in that date.
Eribenne has described audience interactivity as one of her favourite elements of performance. A live audience can become part of the stage event rather than a silent judge of a completed statement. That change has consequences for a work about representation. Viewers cannot fully outsource the task of listening to a curator or an artist. Their responses become part of the atmosphere in which the dialogue unfolds. The work asks an institution to look at itself, and asks its public how they participate in that looking.
The artist’s own chronology records the 2019 prize performance and later presentations of its video. A prize can mark institutional recognition, but it does not resolve the power question raised by the work. Indeed, the fact that a work about the treatment of artists of colour was honoured by an art institution adds another layer to its reception. The award made the performance more visible; the performance continues to ask how visibility is managed.
Killing time, making time
Eribenne’s Killing Time combines photographic portraits and performance. The 2025 interview’s artist statement identifies Tyche, an angelic character associated with timelessness. Rather than presenting time as a neutral measurement, the work treats it as a social construction that a performer can confront and rearrange. The title is double-edged. To kill time can mean to pass it idly; in a performance about temporality, it can also mean to challenge the authority of the clock itself.
The artist’s site records a 2020 performance, a photo exhibition and an object installation associated with Killing Time. These forms address the question differently. A portrait fixes a pose for a viewer to return to. A performance lasts only while the body acts, even when video preserves a trace. An installation asks visitors to move among objects in real space. Their combination resists reducing time to either a frozen image or a linear event. Eribenne builds several ways for a visitor to encounter the same speculative problem.
A published image caption identifies Killing Time #1 as a 2020 C-print. That specific material is useful. A photographic print appears to stop a moment, yet the surrounding project questions whether a moment can be held separately from the histories and expectations that shaped it. Tyche is an invented figure inside the artist’s work, not a claim that time has literally been overcome. The figure gives the inquiry a body. The viewer meets an image that looks back while the performance asks them to consider how long they are willing to stay.
In the Al-Tiba9 interview, Eribenne explained that an idea may arrive with more than one medium already attached. She did not begin Killing Time by choosing photography, then add performance as promotion. The portrait series and stage action grew together. That account helps explain why the still image should not be treated as a mere record of a more authentic live event. Each format makes a different demand on the audience and helps define the character’s relation to time.
Another short work, When Time Has Flown, premiered in 2021 as a one-woman show at Vienna’s Volkskundemuseum, according to Eribenne’s own announcement. The title sounds like the aftermath of Killing Time: time has become something that can leave the room. Eribenne has grouped the performance with her explorations of Afrofuturism and postcolonial history. Its solo format places that exploration on one performer’s body, while the museum setting gives the audience a public place in which to consider the argument. The question of who controls a timeline is carried by a speaking and moving person, not an illustration of an imaginary machine.
Old instruments, different images
Eribenne is also interested in tools such as the magic lantern and panorama, technologies that helped shape nineteenth-century spectatorship. Her 2025 artist profile describes her attempt to turn apparatus once used in colonial representation toward self-determined images of West African spirituality. The equipment is old; the change lies in who directs the image and whose world it makes visible. In this respect, a historical projection device can become part of an Afrofuturist method without looking new.
That method also clarifies the artist’s interest in photography. A camera has long carried claims of evidence, even when its framing and circulation have served unequal power. Eribenne’s childhood effort to enter old photos was an effort to overcome their apparent distance. Her later art asks more difficult questions about how images were made and what viewers have been trained to see. A photograph from a colonial archive and a portrait she stages herself can share a medium while making opposite demands of their audience.
Her series Borders began from photographing refugees at an Austrian centre during the 2015 migration crisis, according to the artist statement. That origin shows how the question of movement between places remains present beside the speculative trips between times. A border can determine where a person is allowed to live; an image can influence whether they are seen as a neighbour, a stranger or an abstraction. Eribenne’s practice repeatedly brings those acts of classification into view.
Not every work she makes is Afrofuturist in the same way. Borders draws on a contemporary encounter, while the Vienna play openly uses a time machine and Woman to Woman II creates a fictional dialogue across an older musical reference. The differences are part of the practice’s range. An artist concerned with time and representation does not need every project to deploy the same device. The more revealing continuity is the effort to question who has been placed outside a story, and what formal change might let them speak from within it.
Music as a way through
Before film and photographic work became central, Eribenne had a long history in music and performance. She told Al-Tiba9 that music remains a primary motivator, even when she uses a camera or a stage text to tell a story. In Woman to Woman II, a 1974 song supplies both title and interlocutor. Sound gives the historical reference duration: an audience has to hear it unfold, not merely recognize its date in a wall label.
Her career has included collaborations with experimental musicians, but those credits are less illuminating than the role she gives music inside a work. A rhythm or sung phrase can change how a performer moves, how long a silence feels and when the audience understands a turn in the story. Eribenne is drawn to theatre that combines song, text and visual media without making any of them an accessory. This composite form suits her theme. Time is felt differently in a song, a still photograph and a live scene; bringing them together lets those differences become the work’s material.
The music also helps keep her science-fiction premises from becoming diagrams. A time machine could be a prop used to illustrate a theory of history. A voice singing across a reference to 1974 makes that history bodily and emotional. The audience may know the concept before the melody finishes, but the performance asks them to stay with its duration. That insistence on lived time complicates any fantasy of stepping outside the present with the push of a button.
Eribenne has spoken of an interactive time-machine project that could take audiences toward precolonial West African cosmologies. In the 2025 interview, she described it as future work and declined to reveal a settled form. Its ambition can be understood through the completed pieces without pretending it has already become an installation. The Vienna play, Woman to Woman II and Killing Time have each rehearsed a different way of making people feel the instability of a historical frame. The proposed project would extend a question already active in them.
Krull’s conversation about futuristic dreams in the Congo diaspora asks what happens when people create images of futures informed by diasporic experience. Eribenne answers from a particular European location. Vienna can feel like a time machine because its social present does not always match its claim to cosmopolitan modernity. A staged salon, an institutional dialogue and an angel of timelessness are different ways to expose that mismatch. Her work asks an audience to notice the clocks by which they decide who belongs to the present.
The comic premise of a mistaken destination remains a strong image for Eribenne’s art. A traveller tries to return to a known past and lands in an unfamiliar present that resembles it too closely. The joke sharpens rather than softens the discomfort. Yet the traveller reaches a salon where another conversation can begin. Eribenne’s Afrofuturism lives in that opening. Time can be reordered through fiction, performance and shared attention, and the person who was treated as out of place can take the stage and choose the next scene.