(italiano sotto)
Timed to coincide
with the Venice Biennale's 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice
Biennale's 55th International Art Exhibition,The Japan Foundation will present
a special exhibition titled Unattained Landscape will present a special
exhibition titled Unattained Landscape in conjunction with
the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. Focusing on the themeof identity in
Japanese culture, the event will consist of works by both Japanese and foreign
artists representing a wide range of genres, including contemporary art,
graphic design, literature, film, sound and manga.
In organizing
this exhibition, The Japan Foundation aims to foster greater global
understanding, transmit information about Japanese culture and contribute to
international cultural activities.
Unattained
Landscape is an exhibition that promotes art and cultural exchangesheld within
The Japan Foundation to ultimately reflect contemporary creation by
reconsidering and questioning the islands of Japan as potential models for
contemporary culture. How can this vast and dispersed land be home to
a common culture? How might it invoke common sensations in those who visit? How
does this inform judgment on communities, however scattered and fragmented, on
a global scale?
Unattained
Landscape challenges the archipelago - the land in its contemporaryform, and
whatever it means to belong to a community, including the conditions of
formation and its relation to a territory. As nations are perpetually made or
unmade, and as they subsequently mark territories with new physical boundaries,
mental and temporal maps imperceptibly emerge to create invisible,
discontinuous territories that transcend notions of a 'nation'. These maps reveal
an imaginary version of Japan; they convey desires and paradigms of a country
represented not only by a group of cities, poetry, games or food, but by a
fusion of fantasies invoked and inspired by Japanese and non-Japanese minds and
films. Artists invited to take part in the exhibition will contribute to
opening new insights in an attempt to answer these questions.
The exhibition
will feature the work of Japanese and international artists from multiple
creative fields: visual art, graphic design, cartoon, literature, performance,
sound and film. Ultimately, Unattained Landscapeproposes an overlapping of
skills,attitudes and disciplines that promotes a way beyond the repetitive
format of traditional contemporary art exhibitions. This renewed curatorial approach
functions as the best way of describing the hectic changes within Japanese
identity, and it is a microcosm that illustrates worldwide changes in how
global communities choose to conceive, represent and live life.
The artists
are: Meiro Koizumi, Simon Fujiwara, Shuji Terayama, Tomoko Yoneda, Marina
Abramovic, Maurizio Cattelan e Pierpaolo Ferrari, Karen Cytter, Tacita Dean,
Hiroya Oku, Jim O'Rourke, David Peace, Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Participants
Meiro
Koizumi. Born in 1976 in Gunma Prefecture; lives and works in
Yokohama.Meiro Koizumi graduated from the International Christian University
and studied film at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His
plot-based works and performances, which are characterized by intense physical
movement, are filled with sensational violence. While presenting biting
criticism of authority and social norms, Koizumi reveals an underlying sense of
vulnerability and humor. He has held solo exhibitions such as MAM Project 009:
Koizumi Meiro (Mori Art Museum,Tokyo, 2009), Broken Hero, Beautiful Afternoon
(Artspace, Sydney, 2011), Defectin Vision (Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam,
2012), and Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi
Simon
Fujiwara. Born in 1982 in London, Simon Fujiwara spent his
childhoodbetween Japan, England, Spain and Africa. In dense dramas about
personal relationships, family relations, politics, architecture and history,
his work explores biographies and 'real-life' narratives through a combination
of performance, video, installation and short stories. Often appearing within
his own works and assuming various guises, from anthropologist to erotic
novelist, he also works with a cast of friends, family members and
collaborators who present versions of themselves and their own biographies as
characters within his dramas. In linking fictional and real people as well as
locations and events, he explores the boundary between the real and the
imagined, often revealing the very fiction of such distinction.
Shuji
Terayama. Born in 1935 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture. Terayama beganto
write tanka and haiku poems in junior high school and submitted his work to
newspapers and magazines. Continuing to devote himself to poetry as a student
at Waseda University, he developed friendships with Taichi Yamada, Makoto Ooka
and Shuntaro Tanikawa. In 1955, Terayama was forced to leave the university due
to illness. While publishing collections of poems and essays, he began to write
scripts for radio and TV dramas around 1959. In 1967, he formed
the Tenjo Sajiki
theatre troupe with Tadanori Yokoo, Yutaka Higashi and Eiko Kujo (later Kyoko).
The group attracted a great deal of attention through a succession of
avant-garde productions beginning with The Hunchback of Aomori, The
Crimeof Fatso Ooyama and La Marie Vison. Terayama was also involved
in producingcountless films, including a number of experimental works, based on
his scripts, which along with his theatre works earned him international
acclaim. In 1983, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in a Tokyo hospital. He was
47.
Tomoko
Yoneda. Born in 1965 in Hyogo Prefecture; currently based in London.Yoneda
completed a masters course at the Royal College of Art in London in 1991. Her
ambitious work, based on the themes of memory and history, has a journalistic
focus. She has shown her work in exhibitions such as Beyond Memory and
Uncertainty (Shiseido Gallery, 2003), Non-Sect Radical,Contemporary
Photography III (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2004), After the
Thaw (Shiseido Gallery, 2003), Non-Sect Radical,Contemporary
Photography III (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2004), After the
Thaw (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2004), After the Thaw(Shugo Arts,
2005), Venice Biennale (2007), Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
(2008), Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can There Be Art? (Mori Art Museum,
2010),Kuandu Biennale (Taipei) and the 2012 Kiev Biennale. Yoneda is scheduled
to hold a solo exhibition later in 2013, on Saturday, July 20, at the Tokyo
Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Marina
Abramovic. Born in Belgrade and lives and works in New York. Since thebeginning
of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic has
pioneered performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most important
early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring
her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actions of
everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for
emotional and spiritual transformation.
Maurizio Cattelan
and Pierpaolo Ferrari (Toiletpaper). TOILETPAPER is apicture-based
magazine founded in 2010 by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.
TOILETPAPER
images have been reviewed by weekly and art magazines worldwide and have
appeared in special issues of magazines such as Vice and Hunger.
In May2012, TOILETPAPER was also exhibited on the High Line Billboard in New
York City. In the same year images taken from the first six issues were
published in an anthology with selected narrative texts, which was reviewed
in The New York Times'Top 10 Photo Books. Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo
Ferrari are now working on the eighth issue, to be released in June 2013.
Toiletpaper is published and distributed by Damiani Editore.
Keren
Cytter. Born in Tel Aviv, and lives and works in New York. She creates
films,video installations and drawings that represent social realities through
experimental modes of storytelling. In her films, emotional status of the
characters and sound/music effects are interwoven into the picture, sometimes
monotonously and sometimes passionately, thus playing a very important role.
Characterized by a non-linear, cyclical logic, Cytter's work consists of
multiple layers of images including linguistic conventions and traditional
interpretation schemata. She also formed a theatre group, D.I.E. Now (Dance International
Europe), and has presented theatre projects, which consist of dance, video and
music.
Tacita
Dean. Born in Canterbury (UK) and lives and works in Berlin. The
films,drawings and other works by Tacita Dean are extremely original. Her
recent film portraits express something that neither painting nor photography
can capture. They are purely film. And while Dean can appreciate the past, her
art avoids any kind of academic approach. Dean's art is carried by a sense of
history, time and place, light quality and the essence of the film itself. The
focus of her subtle but ambitious work is the truth of the moment, the film as
a medium and the sensibilities of the individual.
Rirkrit
Tiravanija. Lives and works in New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai. Since
theearly 1990s, Tiravanija has explored a new aesthetic paradigm of
interactivity. He has cooked and served food to his audiences, set up a
recording studio in a museum, reconstructed his apartment inside a gallery for
visitors' use, and provided opportunities for numerous other everyday
activities to occur within art spaces. Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates
situations in which visitors are invited to participate or perform. In turn,
their shared experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and altering
its form.
Hiroya
Oku. Hiroya Oku currently lives in Tokyo. In 1992, Oku began publishing
theHen: Suzuki-kun and Sato-kun series in the manga, Weekly Young Jump. He
latercreated the HEN and 0 1 Zero One series, and followed in 2000 with the
ongoing series GANTZ, whose sales exceeded 20 million copies. In 2004, GANTZ
was released as an animated TV series, and in 2011 it became a live-action
film.
Jim
O'Rourke. Born in Chicago; currently living in Tokyo. In addition to
buildingbridges between contemporary and popular music as music director for
the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, O'Rourke has also earned a loyal following
for his work as a member of the band Sonic Youth and his participation in
numerous albums by various artists. He received a Grammy award for his
production of Wilco's A Ghost is Born in 2004. O'Rourke is highly
regarded as a prominent figure in thecurrent American music scene. Also
well-versed in Japanese culture, he is active in a variety of activities such
as Akira Sakata and the Boredoms, and a critical review of the work of
filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu.
David
Peace. Born in West Yorkshire (UK) and lives in Tokyo. He is the author of
the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven,
NineteenEighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three), which was adapted into a three-part
Channel 4 series (2009); GB84 which was awarded the James Tait Black
Memorial Award; andThe Damned Utd, the film version of which was released
in 2009. Tokyo Year Zero, the first part of his acclaimed Tokyo
Trilogy, was published in 2007, and the second part, Occupied City, in
2009.
Curators
The architect and
artist Didier Faustino lives and works in Paris, where he exploresthe
relationship between body and space. His international projects are characterized
by their fictional dimension, criticality, freedom of codes, and their ability
to offer new experiences to the individual and collective body. Several works
comprise the collections of major institutions, including MoMA, Gulbenkian and
Beaubourg. In 2009, Faustino curated Evento - a new artistic and urban event in
Bordeaux. He currently teaches at the Architectural Association in London, and
he works on several architectural projects in France and abroad.
Akiko
Miyake is the co-founder and program director of the Center for
ContemporaryArt, CCA Kitakyushu. Since CCA's inauguration in 1997, she has
curated more than 80 projects and has published, edited and art directed over
70 titles in the CCA Artists' Book series, including a number of other editions
such as Substantials,a serial on experimental music. In 2001 she conceived and
co-organized the ongoing international conference Bridge the Gap?, which
continues to be held as a multidisciplinary event focusing on art, science and
the humanities. In 2008, she was appointed as one of the curators of the
Yokohama Triennale.
Angela
Vettese heads the graduate program in visual arts at the Iuav Universityof
Venice, teaches at the Bocconi University in Milan and has been president of
the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice since 2002. From 1995-04 she served
as curator at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, and from 2005-09 she was
the director of the Galleria Civica in Modena. In addition to chairing the jury
of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Vettese has authored several books and essays. She
has been a columnist for the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore for more than
25 years.
Sumi
Hayashi was the curator of Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art
from1989-12, where she organized a number of exhibitions including Is This
Art? (1998)and Sleeping / Dreaming / Awakening (2002), as well
as the solo exhibitions ofRobert Ryman (2004), Gerhard Richter (2001, 2005) and
Mark Rothko (1995, 2009). She was appointed as commissioner for Japan's
participation in the 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (2010) and is working
on various art projects. Hayashi currently works as an independent curator in
Kobe.
After serving as
a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2006-11), Sachiko
Namba established the Japan-based I plus N Ltd. to organize art
exhibitionsand workshops with a specific focus on socially engaged art
practices. She is the author of Curating Contemporary Art in Japan: 1950s
to the Present. Her curatorial projects include Interweaving Cultures (2004,
Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok), Curating Contemporary Art in Japan:
1950s to the Present. Her curatorialprojects include Interweaving
Cultures(2004, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok), Interweaving
Cultures (2004, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok),Garden for Children
(2010, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), and BreathingAtolls:
Japan-Maldives Contemporary Art Exhibition (2012, National Art Galleryof the
Maldives, Male, which traveled to Spiral, Tokyo).
Exhibition Design
Bureau des
Mesarchitectures. Created in 2002 by Didier Faustino and Pascal Mazoyer, the
Bureau des Mesarchitectures works on different fields and scales of
architecture - from installation to experimentation, scenographies to devices—
intensifying the senses and questioning the use of space.
Catalogue &
Graphic Design
Zak Kyes / Zak
Group. Zak Kyes is a London-based graphic designer. He foundedZak Group in
2005, and since 2006 has been the art director of the Architectural Association
(AA), London. Zak Group is a design studio focusing on publication, identity,
exhibition design and art direction for art, architecture and institutional
clients. The studio's approach is defined by its active collaborations in
ever-changing constellations. The studio is engaged in complex projects that
integrate graphic design, publishing, research, strategy and architecture.
