William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time, which is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is a tour de force, combining sound and moving images in a installation utilizing a five-channel video and sculpture. Kentridge is an artist of Jewish and Caucasian ethnicity who was born and raised in South Africa and is currently based in Johannesburg.

The exhibition explores the intersection of time and memory, science and globalization. Though these themes are frequently present in the South African artist's work, the idea for this installation developed through years of discussion between the artist and Peter Galison, a professor of history of science at Harvard University. The five-channel video with sound, megaphones and metronomes, surrounds a wooden sculpture, which Kentridge refers to as an "elephant," and a "breathing machine." The piece is the product of a collaboration between four individuals: Galison, composer Philip Miller, video filmmaker Catherine Meyburgh and Kentridge himself.

Rustic, old world-inspired animations that evoke European colonialism and the early 20th century are gracefully utilized to inspire nostalgia in the piece. The five screens, which each play separate images, at times will randomly, but with panache, join together to play the same image at the same time. 

The drama of the installation, which places the viewer in the midst of a lost time, is heightened by both the time-ticking metronomes and the wooden sculptural "elephant" in the center of the room. In my opinion, however, the wooden sculpture does not resemble an elephant but rather a large bellows. Kentridge calls the sculpture an elephant, though, in reference to Charles Dickens' novel, Hard Times, where machines can move "like an elephant in a state of melancholy madness." 

In this way, the elephant does evoke a sense of grace as it is keeping track of time. However, it is hard to know exactly how the machine is measuring time. The movements of the clunky contraption mimic the 19th-century Parisian method of regulating clocks by pumping air through tubes beneath the streets. As the machine moves forward and backward, to a slow, rhythmic beat, it appears slightly clunky-an anachronistic symbol in our world of fast cars and progressing technology. 

From the moving elephant sculpture to the metronomes, to the animations, which combine black and white images, it is apparent that the passing of time and our desire to measure time is at the center of this installation. Working within the framework of the relativity of time as articulated by Albert Einstein, the installation juxtaposes the relative nature of time in a world obsessed with measuring, fixing and standardizing, as reflected in Britain's declaration of a universal time throughout its empire. This is just one instance of our refusal to work with time. 

As Kentridge writes, "Everybody knows that we are going to die, but the resistance to that pressure coming towards us is at the heart of the project. At the individual level, it was about resisting; not resisting mortality in the hope of trying to escape it, but trying to escape the pressure that it puts on us." On the global scale, refusal reflects "the European sense of order imposed by time zones; not only literally, but this refusal also referred metaphorically to the other forms of control as well." 

An adjoining room that combines a series of drawings from Kentridge helps to contextualize Kentridge's work as the artist has always argued that the root of his work is drawing. The charcoal and ink drawings and etches combined with the impressive installation render the viewer with pangs of nostalgia as the fleeting nature of time is revealed. 

It is through the exhibition that one realizes the transient nature of time. The days may feel long, but the years and decades, our arbitrary markers of time, are short. The exhibition is on view until May 4.