05 Jul 2009

Keren Cytter and Yukihiro Taguchi at ScalaMata - 53 Venice Biennale Collateral event

The matter of things //La materia delle cose brings together works of two prominent video artists Keren Cytter and Yukihiro Taguchi

Curator // Curatrice Dovrat ana Meron


Keren Cytter
Four seasons

Keren Cytter creates films, video installations and drawings, representing social realities through experimental modes of storytelling. Characterised by a non-linear, cyclical logic Cytter's films consist of multiple layers of images, conversation, monologue and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, the artist's films depict intensified scenes drawn from everyday life in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production.
Four Seasons combine the kitsch quality of 80s cult cinema with allusions to realist literature. Drawing on references as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Hitchcock; Luigi Pietrucci; Samuel Becket; Kenneth Anger; Ernesto Modani; Julio Cortázar and Ryunosuke Akutagana.

Keren Cytter was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2008, Cytter was awarded the prestigious 'ars viva' prize by Kulturkeis der deutschen Wirschaft. The artist was also the recipient of the Bâloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2006. Major solo exhibitions of Cytter's work include Witte de With (2008); Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Huarte (2008); Stuk Kunstcentrum, Leuven (2007); MUMOK, Vienna (2007), and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006). Group exhibitions include Television Delivers People, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Manifesta 7, Trentino (2008), and Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama (2008). Cytter's work will be showcased at CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu in 2009. The artist will also show at the New Museum's first triennial: Generational: Younger than Jesus, New York (2009).
Cytter is the author of three novels: The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (Lukas and Sternberg, New York – Berlin, 2005); The seven most exciting hours of Mr Trier's life in twenty four chapters (Witte de With, STUK & Sternberg, New York – Berlin, 2008), and The Amazing True Story of Moshe Klinberg – A Media Star (onestar, Paris, 2009).

Yukihiro Taguchi
Moment - Performative walk (04:36')
About (2:42')
Fabric (02:52')
chair (00:14)

Yukihiro Taguchi's performative installation catch the forces of the space: the objects become organic, sliding slowly, drifting and constructing in time always different configurations. 'It is not my performance, it is the performance of the space', says Yukihiro Taguchi. Per formative is an installation which becomes the author: it manifests actively its expressive potentiality and acts from the inside out. Performativity makes the work vivid, experience able and connects it to its context: the outside space and the inside space build upon each other and form the work. The film we see is not an artificial effect: through serial photography, which record what is going on in the space, results a new continuity, a new order. Its accelerated temporality makes visible. The artist draws back and we see what is going on with the space.

'I am for my works, what is in traditional Japanese theatre a kuroko: a character, dressed in black, his face is also covered, who is leading the whole theatrical performance from the backstage. He is preparing the stage, he is giving indications to the actors but remains always unnoticed. Without his presence in the background, the theatre could not develop, but still he remains always hidden, even if he acts in the front. This position, which I always adopt, is better for my work. If I get too much involved in my work, I will make a work about myself and I want to bring always my work as autonomous in the foreground.'

Yukihiro Taguchi follows in his works the obvious – its condensed presence he makes visible and draws into consciousness: space, air, tension. He follows the usually not noticed relations between objects in space, the way in which space appears through constitution of relations, the spaces, which appear between other spaces and our relation to them. States of exception, oscillation and instability provoke awareness about the inner order of the normality.

Re-spacing is a conceptual game, through which space becomes ascertainable. Re-spacing creates the experience of the transformation of the functions of the space and the transformation of experiences, which a certain space can generate. Movement arises through manipulation and negation of evidences and an affirmative, discursive space is opened.

In his previous works, Yukihiro Taguchi has also re-spaced existing spaces, through minimal interventions, which let internal, structuring forces of our quotidian experience manifest. And by these forces his installations begin to function. He took off the wood panels covering the floor of the gallery and constructed every weekday another installation exclusively out of them, inside the gallery, where the visitors could spend time and preoccupy with activities he proposed, or he rose off the carpet that covered the gallery floor, and a new space came out underneath. A temporal and spatial fluidic continuum is broken through – these new spaces seem always to have been there. Possible moments of the space vagabond from one order to another, they belong to the personal order of the visitors, who experience the space and are then hidden back into the floor. Space Generates here time. In other works, he invites the audience in his huge plastic balloons and takes slowly the air out till they think they cannot breathe any more. Space is here air. In other installations he marks with airbags the empty space between daily used objects. In an earlier work, he installs objects in space, which maintain in equilibrium only through the tension which exists between them.

Notice in this exhibition the miniature work, hidden between two boxes: the pencil, sharpened on both ends, which is creating, by writing, the moment between a past and a future.

Yukihiro Taguchi is catapulting his spaces from their being into their becoming. In this movement there results a perceivable intensity. The implications can be multiple: social, cultural, political, but they remain open. It is not about a demonstrative content, but about a certain ability to see.
Part of text by Marta Jecu


Segment of text of Marta Jecu
Courtesy of Sakamoto Contemporary Berlin

Performance – 'Memory Space' - a series of performance events in various locations and events throughout the 53rd Venice Biennale. workshops. For more information visit: www.arte-misia.eu