EXHIBITION
Exhibition
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Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary
2021.4.29(Thu.) - 2021.9.26(Sun.)
Today, more than a year after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which began in early 2020, there is still no sign that the virus is abating. While daily life has changed throughout the world, in Japan, a country long prone to earthquakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters, many people are accustomed to living with the anxiety and tension that some kind of threat may arise in everyday life. In this exhibition, we reexamine aspects of everyday life that we have no choice but to be aware of. First of all, what makes an everyday thing everyday? Some of these things include the little habits and daily chores that we carry out in our lives, and the appointments that we make with our family and others in the area. There are also things like the passage of time and landscapes, which remain largely the same. But even when we repeatedly perform some kind of activity as a matter of course, everyday life differs depending on the person or family. Some of the works in this exhibition focus on tiny creative acts in our lives that we tend to ignore or overlook. Others capture the inner workings of the heart when we are faced with sudden loss or disaster. And still others express the ever-changing form of everyday life. What emerges somewhere between the odd and the ordinary is the present. List of works
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Collection Exhibition 1: Inner Cosmology
2021.6.15(Tue.) - 2021.11.3(Wed.)
In our day-to-day lives there are a great many things over which we have no power. In the face of this reality, by communicating their thoughts to a specific deity, or perhaps to spirits dwelling in nature, or by looking into their own hearts, since time immemorial people have immersed themselves in the vast cosmos beyond their reach alone, and gone about their lives hoping that this transcendent force will bring them reliable everyday blessings. And now as ever, various acts of prayer, religion, and reflection are part and parcel of our daily lives. One source of the arts, including fine art, music, and dance, also sat alongside these everyday acts. Art, which renders invisible worlds visible, served as a medium to guide people to the infinite universe. And though times change, as long as we continue to seek day-to-day peace in our lives, perhaps this role of art is also manifested in contemporary art, in a different form. “Inner Cosmology” attempts to unravel this aspect of contemporary art through the lens of religion, prayer and reflection (introspection), using mainly works from the Museum’s own collection. By giving visitors a glimpse into myriad cultures from around the world, through their different forms of religion, prayer, and reflection, we hope this exhibition will not only offer a new perspective on art today, but encourage greater understanding of the sheer diversity of religious culture.
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Doug Aitken: i am in you
2021.4.29(Thu.) - 2021.11.23(Tue.)
This exhibition showcases Doug Aitken's i am in you, presented at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa for the first time since its acquisition. Doug Aitken is known for an incredibly diverse body of work ranging from video, photography, sculpture and architectural interventions, to sound, installation, and film offerings. i am in you is a 5-screen video installation. Amid everyday scenes of American suburbia, people, nature, manmade objects, and geometric designs overlap deftly with a young girl's whispering voice, hands clapping in rhythm, and a piano melody, drawing the viewer inexorably into the flow of hallucinatory images on the video. As these images repeat continuously, fragmenting without providing any firm narrative contours, the audience feels the power and speed of this elusive state of flux at a visceral level, experiencing the work as a wandering journey through a vortex of visuals and sound. This is a stunning opportunity to experience first-hand the dynamism of a Doug Aitken video installation in the spacious surroundings of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
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Kodomochounaikai: playing, learning, connecting through design
2021.4.3(Sat.) - 2022.3.21(Mon.)
Kodomochounaikai Jimukyoku, established in 2014 by architect Shikichi Kaori, is an organization that assembles and runs workshop programs to cultivate the intelligence and sensitivity that enable children to identify issues and solve problems creatively, through design. Kodomochounaikai Jimukyoku provides supervision and support for the activities of children's design teams called called “Kodomochounaikai.” The design activities of these “Kodomochounaikai” ultimately coalesce in the form of a “festival” that connects them to the local community. The children who design the festival get to engage with many other children and, families, and local residents enjoying the festival, and interact with the many friendly adults providing support and watching overseeing their activities. Kodomochounaikai program festivals become places for children to experience a successful realization of ideas, and be part of society. As well as providing an overview of Kodomochounaikai activities since 2014, in a Kanazawa edition of the program, visitors to this exhibition will have the chance to experience the process of design education with children and local residents, and explore the possibilities of design, in the lead-up to a Kodomochounaikai “festival” in Kanazawa.
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Aperto 14
HARADA Yuki: Waiting for
2021.6.15(Tue.) - 2021.10.10(Sun.)
Throughout his career Harada Yuki (b. 1989) has dealt in artists and art forms such as Christian Riese Lassen, and ghost photography, which despite occupying a solid position in the visual culture of a particular era, languish on the margins of art history. This solo outing will consist of a video installation incorporating “Waiting for,” Harada’s first new series in two years. In 2017, Harada began collecting photos mainly picked up by junk removal contractors, and subsequently unwanted. 2019’s One Million Seeings shows the artist personally taking in his hand each one of these photos and examining it. This act of casting an eye over images that were once seen by someone, then abandoned, and which will eventually disappear from both memory and history, took a whole twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, the work Waiting for, Harada’s latest offering and first in his “Waiting for” series, uses the CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology employed in the production of open world games to present “scenes from a million years ago/in the future.” In a world created entirely through artificial means, a voice recites the names of all the animals existing on Earth, in a work sure to summon up strong sensations of absence. At first glance contrasting works, both One Million Seeings and Waiting for document humans engaging with vast amounts of information and attempting to incorporate it. The artist refers to this act as “Waiting.” The act of looking at something that once existed, and waiting for something that might visit, could be described as entrusting oneself to the temporal void between before and after an event. In an age when people pick up, and simultaneously let go, enormous volumes of information on a daily basis, “Waiting for” will offer one man’s approach to engaging with the world. handout
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