Sister Sylvester
Shadowtime
Virtual Reality / Film
‘Shadowtime’ is a word drawn from a new lexicon for the anthropocene. It is the feeling of occupying two irreconcilable times simultaneously. Making breakfast for a child, while knowing that in that child’s lifetime a species of flower that has existed for millennia has gone extinct. Driving to try and make work on time it occurs to you that the gas in your engine is the compressed bones of prehistoric creatures.
Shadowtime takes these temporal incompatibilities and explores them in the realm of virtual reality and simulation theory. To exist in the virtual world is to have two bodies, four hands, two hearts—to exist in two worlds at the same time. Alma, a mysterious guide to this double world, leads you through questions around climate crisis, grief, and the provocation of the virtual as a retreat or shelter, or as a place from which to come to learn how to be in two places, two times, simultaneously.
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sister sylvester is a multimedia artist. Her most recent works, Constantinopoliad, won the Interactive award at CPH:DOX 2025, and Drinking Brecht, an interactive documentary, premiered at IDFA 2024. Both continue to tour internationally. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally.
In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad (live), with a score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024.
She is a Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and an ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.
