Time has always weighed heavily on the minds of artists. It is the ultimate thief. What is time and how do you mark it? Since every day is a school day here at the coal face of art excavation I have now discovered that visual maps of time – or timelines as we now refer to them – first saw the light of day in the early 17th century.

This nugget was passed on to me by Dr Dominic Paterson, curator of a new exhibition at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Art Gallery called A Synchronology: the Contemporary and Other Times, which opens this Friday.

I need no excuse to go scurrying down a virtual rabbit hole in search of a timeline for timelines so, guided by Paterson, I duly discovered that the first significant one in history was crafted by one Reverend Joseph Mede in 1627. In his book, The Key of the Revelation, Rev Mede included a chart of the events leading up to the expected Apocalypse when Christ would be returning to Earth to defeat the Antichrist.

The Apocalypse should by definition defy a timeline, but time waits for no man. By the Victorian era, one Stephen Hawes was attempting to map a timeline of human history. He called this process synchronology.

Paterson explains: “The Hunterian exhibition takes its name from Hawes’s 1869 timeline of all the events of human history. This was one of a number of efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries to map time and visualise it in easily graspable ways.”

A Synchronology marks 10 years since the opening of one of Glasgow’s contemporary art hubs, The Common Guild in nearby Woodlands Terrace.

From this elegant townhouse belonging to Glasgow-born Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon, The Common Guild has staged an extensive programme of exhibitions and projects since it first opened its doors. Led by director Katrina Brown, it has curated Scotland’s participation in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, commissioning work by Corin Sworn, Hayley Tompkins and Duncan Campbell, who subsequently won the Turner Prize. It has also worked closely with Glasgow University to present talks, symposia and other events. A Synchronology extends this collaboration.

Opening next Friday, the show features the work of internationally-known contemporary artists who have worked with The Common Guild including Robert Barry, Gerard Byrne, Phil Collins, Ruth Ewan, Sharon Hayes, Simon Starling and Corin Sworn.

Paterson says: “Ideas of progress and of time as a linear sequence are supported by images such as the one created by Stephen Hawes, which I hope to include in the exhibition. All the artists in this exhibition could be seen as offering more subtle and more complex notions both of how we experience time and of how it can be given visual form.”

One of the pivotal works in A Synchronology is Robert Barry’s All the Things, a pencil drawing on a wall from 1969 that will be recreated in the Hunterian. The full text by Barry, an American artist considered to be one of the pioneers of conceptual art, reads: “ALL THE THINGS I KNOW BUT OF WHICH I AM NOT AT THE MOMENT THINKING – 1.36PM. JUNE 15 1969.”

“This is the earliest piece in the show,” explains Paterson. “It marks a specific, easily described moment in time, but nominates an unknown – and unknowable – set of thoughts in relation to that moment.”

One artist heavily influenced by Barry is 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, who has had a long association with The Common Guild. A key work in this show is a series of Starling’s framed gelatin silver prints, Pictures for an Exhibition 2013-14. For this work he used a vintage camera to meticulously reconstruct a set of photographs taken of Brancusi sculptures arranged by Marcel Duchamp in 1927.

Starling travelled extensively to track down the original objects in the contexts in which they now exist. Starling’s photographs include multiple exposures which allowed him to combine images of works which are now in locations around the world. These works are accompanied by a text by him which talks out the idea of this being a portrait not only of a moment in art history but also the networks which bind it together.

Other works on show include Sharon Hayes’s My Fellow Americans, a 10-hour-long video performance of all Ronald Reagan’s addresses to the American people; Phil Collins’s film Hero, 2002, based on a manipulative interview with one of the first journalists to breach the security cordon of 9/11; and works from Ruth Ewan’s time-skewing We Could Have Been Anything We Wanted to Be, 2011. Look out for a number of Ewan’s clocks which show 10 hours rather than 12, a reference to the experiment with decimal time conducted during the French Revolution.

A Synchronology is an exhibition which requires the viewer to slow down. Stop all the clocks. Even the ones which are based around a 20-hour day.

A Synchronology: the Contemporary and Other Times, Hunterian Art Gallery, 82 Hillhead Street, Glasgow. October 27-January 28, 2018. Tue-Sat, 10am-5pm; Sun 11am-4pm. 0141 330 4221, thecommonguild.org.uk and gla.ac.uk