There's No Place Like Time: A Retrospective

There's No Place Like Time: A Retrospective is a limited-edition postmodern novel by Lance Olsen, published by &Now Books in 2016.

Plot and structure

There's No Place Like Time: A Retrospective masquerades as a catalogue for a real retrospective of experimental films by a non-existent videographer. Author Lance Olsen and his wife, videographer Andi Olsen, stage the fake retrospective in galleries in Europe and the U.S. The result is a three-dimensional text: a real place dedicated to an unreal career of an artist named Alana Olsen. From her videos and the texts surrounding them, the viewer/reader is invited to treat her like a fictional character, inferring her character, development, obsessions, and relationship with her daughter, Aila, who allegedly curates the exhibit, but is in fact another fictive character. The catalogue/novel is made up of critical and biographical essays, stills, and reminiscences about Alana's small body of work produced in relative anonymity, yet apparently a large influence on artists as varied as Lars von Trier, Douglas Gordon, and Martin Arnold.
Thematically, There's No Place Like Time, then, forms part of a larger conceptual art installation that investigates the difficulties inherent in identity and knowledge about the past.