EXHIBITION
Exhibition
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- Past
Olafur Eliasson "Your chance encounter"
2009.11.21(Sat.) - 2010.3.22(Mon.)
In marking its fifth anniversary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will hold a large-scale solo exhibition structured around new works by the Danish/ Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson titled Your chance encounter.” Olafur Eliasson is known for his exploration of the human perception. His works, often using light, shadow, color, fog, wind, waves, and other phenomena of nature as materials, make apparent to the viewer the mechanisms employed in their presentation. Contrary to what might be expected, this enables people to enjoy more purely the act of seeing, as they discover and experience their surroundings. For example, in Your atmospheric colour atlas, 2009, a large gallery is filled with artificially produced fog, imbued with color emanating from fluorescent tubes of red, green and blue. By moving about in the locations where the colors blend, viewers endlessly create their own color spectrum. Based on a profound understanding of SANAA’s design for this museum, both architecturally and functionally, Eliasson boldly engages the factors that constitute 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In Eye activity line, 2009, 317 canvases of different colors, each about the size of an A5 sheet of paper, are installed on the wall of a long corridor. As our eye follows along the work, which is like a full palette of colors, we are freshly awakened to the character of the space. In such ways, Eliasson explores the Museum’s unique features, displaying works not only in galleries but also in corridors and rest areas, so as to give play to the Museum’s meandering layout and horizontal character, and endeavoring through his artworks to bring interior and exterior into close connection. As they move through the museum building, visitors may be surprised at how Eliasson has transformed the familiar art museum spaces. Eliasson is interested in how 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa—an art museum designed with the functions of a new generation of museums—fulfills a social role as a museum opened to the city. Through this exhibition, he is re-proposing the art museum, not simply as a facility for viewing art in a context removed from society but as a public space having the potential to deeply engage in the society and the urban environment.
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Collection Exhibition "Shift - Field of Fluctuation"
2009.9.12(Sat.) - 2010.4.11(Sun.)
At some odd moment, something happens and suddenly a routinely familiar scene appears like a different world, filled with new meaning. To some extent, we have all experienced this kind of unexpected shift in our perspective or feelings. In contemporary society, overwhelmed by a perpetual flood of things and information, we grow numb in mind and body, and our thinking simply traces the contours of established concepts. What if we should stop, free our thoughts and perceptions, and look freshly at the world now before us and at the events of the past? What if we gave ourselves to the fluctuation and change in our own physical sensations, and to new perceptions and feelings? The works presented in this exhibition work on our sensibilities and promote such a shift in perspective, perceptions, and values. Taking “Shift—Field of Fluctuation” as its keyword, this Collection Exhibition will give play to the unique features of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which is currently marking its fifth anniversary. In glass-enclosed spaces permitting a soft permeability between interior and exterior—where the everyday and the unusual blend in unexpected ways—the exhibition will blur the outlines of things, including our own.
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Tadanori Yokoo Incomplete - What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine.
2009.8.1(Sat.) - 2009.11.3(Tue.)
The essence of Tadanori Yokoo’s art, which cuts across the genres of painting, design, film, theater, music, and culture, is “incompleteness.” In a process of altering our conceptions of the world, Yokoo feeds into himself all he sees and hears, reinterprets it, and outputs it in his own distinctive way. This exhibition, which turns Yokoo’s “incomplete” world inside out and explores it front to back, can be considered Tadanori Yokoo’s Unfinished Symphonic poem. ■ Mass release of uncompleted paintings stored away in Yokoo’s studio Unexhibited works, uncompleted works, rejected works [Gallery 11] ■ Mass outbreak of uncompleted paintings outside Yokoo’s studio ・ Works born from PCPPP and “Yokoo’s Studio” [Galleries 7, 8; Project Room] ■ Incomplete person = incomplete icons the youth in Yokoo endlessly recreates ・ “Pink Girl”: The Madonna of a never-aging youth’s dreams [Galleries 9, 10] ・ “Rousseau”: Yokoo’s bold and impudent acts of parody [Gallery 14] ・ “Y Junction”: Where Yokoo lives—the junction of roads of unknown destination [Galleries 7, 8; other]
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Knit Cafe in my Room by Mitsuharu Hirose and Minako Nishiyama
2009.4.29(Wed.) - 2010.3.22(Mon.)
A tireless proponent of the knitting world, Mitsuharu HIROSE produces highly original knit pieces that display his superb technique. Minako NISHIYAMA pursues an “admirable” or “ideal” world for both the individual and the community through her own free-form language. Here in collaboration, they produce in the exhibition space “Knit Cafe in my Room”, a platform for various knitting projects aimed at aficionados. Through this long-term project, the significance and possibilities of knitting and creativity are explored.
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Hundred Stories about Love
2009.4.29(Wed.) - 2009.8.30(Sun.)
The year 2009 has arrived amid the turmoil of tragic war and a search for new values at the start of a new century. The world around us is changing at an ever-increasing speed. Meanwhile, injured in body and mind, hungry, thirsty, and wandering, we fulfill the tasks of living, as people have done since ancient times. In our experience as human beings, there is perhaps nothing more mysterious than love. “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference and apathy,” philosopher Tetsuzo Tanigawa has said. During our brief lives, we have always found in love something to believe in. Then, there has perhaps never been a time like ours so badly in need of love. This year, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will mark its fifth year. In order to create a forum for dialogue concerning love in its open system of galleries whose round glass walls promote transparency, horizontality, and multi-directionality, the Museum is transcending existing boundaries to invite the participation of researchers and activists in the realms of culture, society, and natural science, and that of creators in wide-ranging genres such as art, music, literature, and the performing arts. The varied forms of expression appearing in the exhibition, “Hundred Stories about Love,” are waiting for someone at anytime to experience them, tell of them, and transform them. A story is no less than an “open dialogue” occurring at the scene of an encounter. The dialogue generated ceaselessly at the Museum will no doubt produce stories in rich profusion. (Translated from Japanese: Brian Amstutz)
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Hiroshi Sugimoto:History of History
2008.11.22(Sat.) - 2009.3.22(Sun.)
Art is technique: a means by which to materialize the invisible realm of the mind. As such, my art is an emblematic rendering of part of my mind in visible form̶or perhaps we might say,samplings from my consciousness. Over my many years as an artist, I have endeavored to hone my technique. The origins of art thus share a common timeframe with the origins of humankind, its beginnings coinciding with the advent of human consciousness. In the course of honing my own technique, Iʼve had to take many predecessors as my models so as to acquire what is to be learned from them̶or again perhaps we might say my models have been sampled from the horizons reached by those predecessors. Whenever I obtained one sample and gained an understanding of a technique, each new mindset made me want the next sample and the next. Understanding one thing always brought the realization that more profound unknowns lay beyond. And so my sample gathering caused a chain reaction that led on who-knows-where. The samples collected here represent offshoot selves, or no, former selves assembled out of necessity in order to learn something or absorb some nurturing sustenance toward further transforming my own art. From these samples, I may now infer how the past relates to my works via an imaginary journey to verify the site of innumerable actualities. I pick up a paleolithic stone tool and it fits snugly in the palm of my hand. I experience the revolutionary technical leap of paleolithic man and the epiphany enters my consciousness̶then I reach for an even better neolithic stone tool. In one instant, I have taken in hundreds of thousands of years of human development. I look at hieroglyphic writing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and see images of gods. This piece of linen thought to have once wrapped a dead body hands me a five-millennia yardstick. The slow passage of ages past seems to speed up and rush headlong at my present self. Changes that once took a thousands years are now achieved in a matter of decades. Timeʼs arrow keeps accelerating asymptotically toward some critical juncture. Civilizations have come and gone since the dawn of heaven and earth, writing and rewriting history at every turn. History is simply the victorsʼ story as passed down by the survivors. And yet the losersʼ stories that have become mere relics for lack of anyone to relate them, those closed pages still tell me things. Just as lifeforms extinct for millions of years still speak to me via their fossils. Throughout my life Iʼve taken one step back from history and gazed fondly at my collection of relics. These relics Iʼve assembled present a history of what history has forgotten, of where stories ended between closed covers. SUGIMOTO Hiroshi
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「shell - shelter」
Collection II
2008.9.13(Sat.) - 2009.4.12(Sun.)
Collection II 「shell - shelter」 There will be no safety zone. --- from: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, ANN LEE IN ANZEN ZONE The “Collection Exhibition” presents important art works reflecting the changing values and transitions of contemporary society and, through their presentation, explores current social issues. The keywords for “Collection II” are “shell — shelter.” The images of the human body presented in the exhibition suggest varying perspectives—a standard for value judgment, a cast-off shell of the emotions or spirit, a shelter allowing us to continue being who we are, life and death, and so on. While questioning existing values and rendering apparent our loneliness and uncertainty, our helplessness, and the distance between us as individuals, these works endeavor to discover anew a place of survival and meaningful existence. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/collection/2008_2/index_en.html
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