A ballad is never in a hurry. It celebrates time in its unfolding, teasing out every detail of a story, occasionally repeating itself for emphasis. Both a musical form and a structural logic, the ballad is as dramatic as it is meandering. This week, the sinuous contradictions of the ballad lend themselves to our consideration of practices that 'take time', in simple but powerful ways.

Roh Soh-yeong, director of an international electronic arts symposium, reflects on the inevitable intersections between art and technology, and the need to learn from the past in how we interpret a new future. At Clerkenwell Design Week 2025, a 900-year-old church became a setting for functional contemporary design.

The Venice Biennale 2026 will honour the curatorial framework sketched out by late curator

Koyo Kouoh, attuning its international exhibition 'In Minor Keys' to the frequencies of slower gears and marginal notes. In Newcastle, British artist Delaine Le Bas, of Romani descent, turns large-scale installations into sets, inviting audiences to enter them and even leave traces behind. 'Five Architecture Fables', a book by Edgar Demello dreams up ecosymbiotic connections that are simultaneously utopian and dystopian in phenomenological readings from the present.

Everyone loves a good story. But you just never know how it might end, do you? In narrative uncertainty, time becomes a steady constant. And the ballad understands that, functioning within the scaffolding of rhythm. Keeping time feels predictable, but also cathartic.