In this paper, I analyze two works in the Met collection: Rayyane Tabet’s Orthostates and Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, both in the Metropolitan Museum Collection. Drawing from the burgeoning fields of heritage studies and decolonization, I investigate the multiple and layered historical moments to which these works refer. The contemporary lens of these works articulate temporality through the entangled eras of ancient civilization, empires, colonialism, nationalisms, and interventionism. I ask how this diversity of temporal imaginaries and their various composites offer alternative modes of recalling and engaging violent pasts, particularly as a challenge to colonial, nationalist, and patriarchal official history. In doing so I propose the conceptual framework of heterochronic imagination, which pushes back against the temporal linearity of modern historiography, instead, attending to the ways past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined to inform our sensibilities, imagination, and interpretation. The multi-temporal emphasis of heterochronic imagination foregrounds the shifting histories and significance of objects, images, and stories through a proliferation of narratives regarding the past, such as archaeology, oral history, memory, genealogy, spectrality, critical fabulation, and speculation. I argue that such multi-temporality holds the potential of redressing not only historical violence but also the violence perpetrated, by official historiography in the present. The paper proposes heterochronic imagination as a curatorial strategy as well as an artistic practice. On an institutional level it asks after how curatorial collaborations, commissions, residency programs, and collecting priorities in the field of contemporary art and across departments might attend to the layered histories of material and epistemic violence that subtend the ways we view the past?