By the time she returned to Hamburg in 1968, she had developed her Konstruktionen (constructions), a method of translating time into handwritten, systematic calculations on graph paper that was a major structuring component of her subsequent works. Taking the first day of January 1968, for instance, the artist breaks down the calendar date 1/1/68 into 1 + 1 + 6 + 8; the resulting 16, often followed by the notation "K," or "K-value," serves as a shorthand for the date, or "Konstruktionen," respectively. Darboven’s calculations chart the time that passes over days, months and years, and thereby convert time from its usual continuous flow into methodical computations divorced from the nuances and narratives of lived time.

Six Books on 1968 was Darboven's first major work to deploy this method of marking time. Across six voluminous books, she presented six different ways to calculate and thus "depict" the year 1968, each circumscribed physically and conceptually by the grid of the graph paper. The artist's handwriting unifies the project visually, bringing order and logic to what was a decidedly disordered and difficult year: the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in the United States; the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War; the rise, and fall, of the Prague Spring; the West German student movement and the May '68 protests in Paris and around the world.

Darboven does not ask us to forget these events, but rather to surrender to a different, unifying form of perception. The work was included early on in several international exhibitions, including Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, famously curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.

With assistance from the German media artist Claus Böhmler, Darboven soon translated this project into film, producing the six-channel, cinematic rendering of Six Books on 1968 (1969) on view in this exhibition.

First realized for an exhibition at Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach in 1969 (today Museum Abteiberg), the work utilizes six 16mm projectors, each of which display the consecutive pages of one of the six books, pulsing to a black screen between each page like the beat of a metronome or strobe light. Darboven's calculations flash momentarily before our eyes as we attempt to discern their logic and progression.