Detail: Artist Sunil Gawde presents ‘Alliteration’ a large (4,5 meters) kinetic black metal kinetic sculpture at the Venice Biennale. Its front side presents a screen-like surface to viewers, a wall on which circular cuts representing 28 moons turn at variable speeds, dipping in and out of view. The reverse side is open, naked to the eye, without hood or baffle: a candid disclosure of the mechanism composed by seven belt-driven wheels, which are choreographing with their movements an elaborate dance of the moons. The sculpture is a complex meditation on the passage of time. It alludes directly to a cosmos calibrated by the interlocking trajectories of suns, moons and planets. The consistent rotation of the multiple moons evokes time but simultaneously provokes us to ponder on the notions of periodicity and duration. When undivided, time has no concrete beginning or end until we begin to domesticate it within markers and pollute it with numbers, creating units and fractions that provide us a sense of duration. Left alone without a sense of frequency, time is an endless journey without stations where the only definite reality is the present. It also emerged out of a playful transliteration of some Indian religious symbols. Shiva the destroyer or transformer god, is wearing a permanently crescent moon as an ornament, that makes him an eternal reality beyond cycles of time symbolized by the waxing and waning of the moon. With understated eloquence, it reflects on a society that has made the transition from an industrial past to a future in which the machine is a splendid ruin rather than engine of profit, quiescent memorial to fortune rather than turbulent generator of change.