EXHIBITION
Exhibition
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Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
2017.11.25(Sat.) - 2018.3.11(Sun.)
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s works display a command of sophisticated sound and video technology, and striking sculptural creations. The viewer undergoes a complex perceptual experience of “hearing and seeing” and enters their imaginative world in a spell of enchantment. When experiencing a Cardiff and Bures Miller work, unseen things become visible, soundless things are heard, and we suddenly step beyond reality into their stories with our senses and values in disarray. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s exhibition at this time features new works and eight installations being shown in Japan for the first time. Installed in the spatially autonomous galleries of this museum, the pieces will transport the audience to imaginary interconnected worlds. A precious opportunity to experience the work of a groundbreaking international artist team.
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Local Textile 1
TO & FRO Thinner, Lighter
2017.11.18(Sat.) - 2018.6.24(Sun.)
Part 1 the “Local Textile” series features TO & FRO, a travel gear brand of the Kaji Group based in Kanazawa and Kahoku. The brand’s name evokes an image of traveling lightly and comfortably “to and fro.” The Kaji Group, possessing advanced technology for weaving extremely thin thread, is producing fabric of unusually light nylon. The nylon fabric is currently used in products by outdoor brands around the world. TO & FRO is the Kaji Group’s own brand of travel organizers and other products created using this fabric. The travel organizers are displayed in this exhibition along with a wide range of fabric samples. Ishikawa prefecture, as a textile producer, has also developed a loom manufacturing industry. Although textile production tends to rely on division of labor, the Kaji Group possesses its own plant for customizing looms. Innovative production at the plant has enabled thread tensioning conducive of weaving with the thinnest, most easily breakable threads. High functionality is a powerful competitive edge over inexpensive mass-produced imported products and an important strategy for the future of Japan’s textile industry.
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TARO IZUMI A Child Suddenly
2017.10.7(Sat.) - 2018.3.25(Sun.)
Taro Izumi (1976 – ) is an artist mainly known for his installations that cross video, performance, drawing, painting, sculpture and other media, exhibiting his work frequently at home and abroad. Izumi’s work characteristically involves everyday matters and objects, and sometimes large numbers of people; by capturing actions that appear at first sight to have no real significance, Izumi highlights absurd experiences that lurk in everyday life. Time and space, real and virtual image, inside and outside, free and unfree – Izumi’s practice plays with and blurs such conventional divisions which we unthinkingly impose on the world, questioning them from startling angles. In this exhibition, Izumi is presenting four new artworks and one book project. Staged in Theater 21 and the Long-Term Project Room is B: But the lens had clearly captured the passing tiger., a work consisting of feature films – the artist’s first such endeavor – along with film posters and a popcorn stand. On the outside of the Long-Term Project Room, there is The Transparent Drool of Fantasy, a work whose concept is “windows fitted with night.” Dawn of the Compact Structures, which will be released halfway through the exhibition period, is a series of videos that superimposes multiple layers of time, resulting in a novel structure for a film. On top of these, works will be completed and added to the exhibition over Izumi’s long-term stay at Kanazawa, including Y: Raise your knee, now lower it. P: I put the stones away so they won’t trip., which sets its sights on the visitors to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Alongside these video works and installations, Izumi will also collaborate with a critic – a specialist at handling words – to produce A Dark Gray Book (provisional title). This work will explore, in book form, new means of communication that might be able to substitute and improve on words. Izumi has long probed the ever-unsolvable, ever-expanding question concerning the knotted relationship that films and images share with the human body and consciousness. This exhibition promises to be an extremely ambitious undertaking that presents a wholly new approach to this question, while remaining in touch with his practice to date.
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150th Year Anniversary of Japan - Denmark Diplomatic Relations Exhibition
Everyday Life – Signs of Awareness
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
Denmark and Japan have become design-oriented nations, each following a path that springs f rom a unique background of history and culture. The countries’ excellent design solutions, inspired by a functional, practical, yet aesthetic approach, are reflections of their cultural identities. Denmark has attracted tremendous attention as one of the most resilient design giants in the fields of architecture, furniture and everyday products since the 1930s. The country established a model for wealthy nations with a highly developed social system with regard to welfare, education and traffic solutions. Japan, on the other hand, is a country which has developed the symbolic design of the time, based on its unique culture and philosophy. The technical expertise required to produce simple and compact shapes and the knowledge and experience to make the most of the material, with a craftsmanship passed down from generation to generation, demonstrate Japan’ s unique position in the global design arena. This exhibition, Everyday Life – Signs of Awareness, showcases the impact of design-minded awareness through the works of designers, architects and artists from Japan and Denmark. It also presents and highlights everyday items that are part of modern life in both countries.
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Jurgen Lehl The End of Civilization
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
Designer Jurgen Lehl (1944-2014) lived at one with nature and continually reminded people of its preciousness. As his “last work” in life, he chose to engage with serious environmental problems, and he created beautiful lighting implements from plastic garbage washing up on beaches. In this way, the harmful plastic which cannot return to the soil instead illuminates spaces and once again serves people usefully. Along with Jurgen Lehl’s lighting implements, the exhibition also displays the “babaghuri” agates that Lehl long hunted and collected, fascinated by each stone’s unique beauty. “The End of Civilization” is a symbolic exhibition, imparting the message of respect for nature Jurgen Lehl left to us when he died suddenly in 2014.
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lab.2
Sight
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
A project to develop “Sight,” a device that extends sensual perception, thereby transforming visual experience into something entirely new. (Project members: WAKE Naoki, SUZUKI Ryohei, FUSHIMI Ryohei and MUNAKATA Yuri.) By changing visual imagery into sound, the device enables us to “hear” the visual world just as porpoises and bats use sound to capture prey. We look at the project’s progress and open the venue as an ongoing research lab.
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Collection Exhibition 2 Undying Life
2017.7.22(Sat.) - 2018.1.8(Mon.)
Today, with the development scientific technologies such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology, long-standing social values are being vigorously shaken. This exhibition displays works concerned with the “migration” of life forms, ranging in spectrum from the transmigration of souls to the artificial creation of new species. We explore the meaning of creating new life forms and possibilities of living in “artificial nature.”
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Aperto 07
KAWAGOE Yurie Insect Specimen of a Coward
2017.5.27(Sat.) - 2017.9.24(Sun.)
“What if human emotions were expressed as insects?” Compelled by this thought, KAWAGOE Yurie (1987-) embodies the heart’s sentiments in imaginary insect figures and evokes a world of illusion. Her “insectified” (not “personified”) motifs she moreover arrays as insect specimens, thereby giving faces to our foolish, loveable emotions. Through her signature piece, “Insect Specimen of a Coward” and latest works, this exhibition will present Kawagoe Yurie’s world and the insect-like emotions she describes as “adorable.”
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Collection Exhibition 1
Collection 1 PLAY / AWAZU Kiyoshi, Makurihirogeru (EXPOSE) 4Makurihirogeru 4
2017.4.29(Sat.) - 2017.7.23(Sun.)
The meaning of PLAY is not limited to ‘activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation.’ It is also a word that expresses active and aggressive acts in our daily life including ‘acting, performing, having a game, behaving and conducting oneself.’ Viewed in that light, our daily life is a succession of PLAY, which might be said to construct one’s personal life and in a broader sense, the culture of human beings. In this exhibition, works by 12 collection artists are introduced focusing on the keyword of PLAY with manifold meanings. They show diverse expansion from works which encourage new discoveries and ideas through viewers’ experiences, to works in which the accumulation of artists’ daily acts and thinking as well as performance and competition are incorporated. We would like to think about how PLAY that is an essential function of humankind appears in the works and what kind of relationship viewers and artworks can develop through the exhibition. We hope that this exhibition itself will inspire viewers to get involved in various PLAYs. Featured also is a small special exhibit of AWAZU Kiyoshi photographic works.
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lab.1
OTON GLASS
2017.4.8(Sat.) - 2017.7.23(Sun.)
The development of the OTON GLASS was occasioned by the project leader’s father’s dyslexia. A device combining glasses with a camera, the OTON GLASS helps people read by changing visual written information into aural voice information. This exhibition follows the development of the OTON GLASS as an aid not only for dyslexia sufferers but also for people in many circumstances where reading characters is difficult, such as travelers walking in cities overseas. In the venue, a space will be established for wearing an OTON GLASS prototype and actually experiencing its functions, so as to make clear the developers’ methods of research toward achieving practical use. Visitors are invited to see the “research site” of a young start-up that is fusing existing technologies to develop a revolutionary new device.
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IKEDA Manabu: The Pen ーCondensed Universeー
2017.4.8(Sat.) - 2017.7.9(Sun.)
Artist IKEDA Manabu (1973–) depicts a monumental world using a super-fine pen point. Working slowly—he can complete only a fist-sized area in a single day— Ikeda manifests a surreal alien world, employing minute delineation and a flair for grand composition. His massive pictures have won him acclaim around the globe. This will be the first large-scale exhibition presenting the entire scope of Ikeda’s production. His Rebirth, a new work he spent three years creating during an artist residency at Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin USA, is a must see.
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Aperto 06
TAKEDA Yusuke
2017.1.21(Sat.) - 2017.5.7(Sun.)
TAKEDA Yusuke (born Hiroshima, 1985) majored in painting at Kanazawa College of Art and in 2014 earned his doctorate at the College’s graduate school. Takeda currently lives and works in Kanazawa, creating installations that combine varying media including painting, photography, video, and sound. Since October last year, he has undertaken production on a daily basis at this museum, using the Project Room as his studio, and this exhibition presents his latest works emerging from in-residency production. Creations employing such media as painting, video, drawing, and statues are installed as independent works in the gallery space, yet meanwhile, they take “image depth / image humidity” as a basso continuo and appear before us as things indefinite or else unclear, overlapping at their deep layers, segmenting, shifting, and changing content. Such works and their correlation evoke coordinate axes containing images of “visible and invisible” and “reality and fiction,” and jolt our perceptions.
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THOMAS RUFF
2016.12.10(Sat.) - 2017.3.12(Sun.)
Thomas Ruff (born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) has been a leading figure in contemporary photography since the 1990s when he emerged as part of the Becher School. Along with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, Ruff studied photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The exhibition introduces a wide range of works by this world-renowned photographer, stretching from his earliest efforts to his most recent and never-before-shown photographs. Ruff was first acclaimed for a series of huge two-meter-high portraits. Since then, he has explored a variety of themes, including architecture, urban landscapes, nudes, and celestial bodies. Through these subjects, he has developed a unique vision of the world we live in. The medium of photography, closely entwined with our vision and perception, is another important theme in Ruff’s work. He searches for new possibilities in photographic expression using a multitude of images as his materials. These not only include Ruff’s own pictures but everything from digital images from the Internet to old photographs he has collected. This exhibition consists of a total of 18 series, approximately 160 works, including Ruff’s first effort Interieurs; Porträts, which earned him widespread acclaim; cassini and ma.r.s., inspired by his boyhood interest in outer space; and nude and jpeg, which examine visual and information spaces in the age of the Internet, and his most recent photographs, press ++.
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The Boundary between Kogei and Design
2016.10.8(Sat.) - 2017.3.20(Mon.)
Kogei or Design? Kogei (craft) and design are divided in two distinct categories regardless of that fact that both are monozukuri (the making of things) and, in this sense, the same. We need not look close, however, to see works/products describable as “design-like Kogei” and “Kogei-like design” in the interval between them. This exhibition will show clearly the ambiguous boundary between Kogei and design by seeing them freshly from the perspectives “Process and Material,” “Hand and Machine,” “Form,” and “Sabi (Change over the Years).” While so doing, it will also consider possibilities on the horizon for Kogei and design, both of which are diversifying with the development of advanced technology.
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Aperto 05
KASHIKI Tomoko ~Daydream~
2016.9.17(Sat.) - 2017.1.9(Mon.)
A series introducing rising young artists in a solo exhibition format."Aperto" is Italian for "open."
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SUPERFLEX One Year Project ― THE LIQUID STATE
2016.4.29(Fri.) - 2017.3.12(Sun.)
SUPERFLEX is an artists’ group based in Copenhagen, Denmark composed of Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. While referencing existing social systems and frameworks, SUPERFLEX engages the community and constructs proposals for new kinds of public space. This time, the artists will view 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa as a petri dish and undertake a one year project of elucidating the museum’s relationship with its community, using three keywords—“cultivation,” “fermentation,” and “tramsformation.”
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