The 18th Annual Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOT Annual 2022) presents works by four artists, OOKUBO Ari, KUDO Haruka, TAKAGAWA Kazuya, and RACHI Akira, whose ages range from 34 to 48 years old. Taking the dislocation of discourse as a starting point, they attempt to present narrative possibilities beyond language and explore how to see and discern people and events forgotten by the times and society in a complex, institutionalized environment.

Language is one of the mediums of shared culture, and the differences in culture can be a source of conflict. Today, the basic meanings and sources of "right and wrong" in semantics seem to be getting more and more confused and blurred. How can we use "misinterpretation" as an opportunity to expand our thinking? Can we really tolerate and truly experience those who think differently from ourselves? The artists in this exhibition are trying to find alternative narrative ways of language, and at the same time, the audience will quietly enter into a discussion and dissemination of contemporary art in the process of exploration.

The first artist, Kazuya Takakawa, was born in 1986 and works primarily with video. His past projects include filming conversations between himself and the psychotherapist he plays, as well as experimental video works in search of consensus among strangers. He is concerned with the effects of language on the human psyche. With references to philosophy and psychiatry in his work, Kazuya Takakawa focuses on a type of work called "psychological experiments" in which he seeks to bring the other closer to his own existence, honing a keen sense of the incomprehensible other. In recent years, he has collected the handwritten diaries of war survivors, the diaries of young people suffering from depression, and the verbal expressions of rappers in Japan, using the "language of despair" as an index. These languages, distilled from different times, places, and experiences, are shrouded by communication breakdowns and translation incompetence, and the artist aspires to reconstruct a multi-structured understanding and imagination of the Other.

At the same time, Kazuya Takakawa is collaborating with several creators, including rapper FUNI, who also tries his hand at rap in the video at the exhibition. The short film traces the artist's personal experience and asks "What do we gain when we use language to express our emotions? And what do we lose?"

The second artist, Haruka Kudo, presents an installation that reflects on the history of Lake Sagami and the resulting discussions of social structures and marginalized groups around resources, welfare, and labor. In her previous works, the former Eugenic Protection Law and the Sagamihara Sanatorium Massacre (an extreme killing of a vulnerable group of people with disabilities at the Sagamihara Sanatorium in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 2016, in which 19 people were killed and 26 injured. is an underlying theme in her work.

Originally a painter, Haruka Kudo began to transform her work in the late 2010s. Based on her research into social issues, combined with her examination of groups who have lost the ability to speak, she began to create installations that combine text, objects, and video. In doing so, Haruka Kudo raises a kind of questioning of the internalization of institutions and laws into the Japanese social value system.

The third artist, OOKUBO Ari, born in 1974, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University and went on to complete postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths College, University of the Arts London and Chelsea College of Art and Design. Since 2000, Ari Okubo has been creating performances, prints, texts and installations based on his own dreams and experiences. In these individual memories and self-created histories, she strives to touch on things that have been shelved or forgotten, and to explain the ambiguity and diversity of narratives.

In this exhibition, Okuburi uses 13 of her past works as inspiration to create a personal narrative on a natural history museum-like time scale. By reconfiguring memory, she intersects multiple stories and time frames, conveying the possibility of alternative narratives that involve the reconfiguration of timelines and the expression of interchangeable subjects and objects in stories.

The fourth artist, Liang Zhixiao, born in 1980 and a graduate of photography at Bournemouth University of the Arts, bases his work on research related to the voting system in recent modern history and develops an artistic practice that can be performed through everyday acts. He uses text, photographs and performance to reveal the political nature of the system as well as reflections on past events.

The exhibited work by Conscience Dawn, which appeared in his 2020 solo exhibition, focuses on a literacy test used for voting rights in the US state of Louisiana in the 1960s, revealing a type of discriminatory prejudice formed through reading, writing and pronunciation. In this history of discrimination based on linguistic differences, Conscience Dawn rethinks the irrational division of boundaries, those who create them, and those they dominate.

The four artists present their unique findings to the audience. They shake up old discursive beliefs by experimenting with the effects of language on the mind, or by imagining individual experiences that are not easily revealed in historical narratives. The works in the exhibition deal with certain topics that are avoided for discussion in the dominant social context. Their approach to discourse is distinct from journalistic or critical discourse systems, and their position aims to seek to cross the border between self and other. In seeking to engage with marginalized groups, the artists make the narrative abstract through fiction and symbolism; they imagine a life unseen, recovering many individual existences that have disappeared from the collective historical memory.

Often, the artists' practices are shaped by their daily lives, and the artistic practices are not always presented as artworks, whether they are driven by the purpose of the exhibition or not, and the artists often continue their daily research and creation in a stalker-like manner. This annual exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art selects a category of artists who are often overlooked, who engage in a practice that is not influenced by the trends of the art world, whose work is not closely related to social hotspots, and who have not been adequately exhibited in museum institutions to date. The post-epidemic museums not only provide a voice for these neglected artists, but also offer the audience an opportunity to imagine and experience unfamiliar narrative discourses. The unnamed artists look at the real world of the majority through the eyes of ordinary people, coldly telling the story of a fugitive, ordinary existence, offering a valuable vision that, as Walter Benjamin put it, "must be seen in such a way as to take the world out of place, to make it strange, to reveal it as it really is, including its cracks and fissures. including its cracks and fissures, as impoverished and distorted as it will one day appear in the light of the Messiah."

Article Source:艺术与设计

版权声明：【除原创作品外，本平台所使用的文章、图片、视频及音乐属于原权利人所有，因客观原因，或会存在不当使用的情况，如，部分文章或文章部分引用内容未能及时与原作者取得联系，或作者名称及原始出处标注错误等情况，非恶意侵犯原权利人相关权益，敬请相关权利人谅解并与我们联系及时处理，共同维护良好的网络创作环境，联系邮箱：603971995@qq.com】