Period:
2015.9.19(Sat.) - 2015.12.13(Sun.)
In 2015, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is holding a series of exhibitions, entitled “The Contemporary,” presenting contemporary artworks that offer insight into today’s world.
“The Contemporary 1—In Our Time: Art in Post-Industrial Japan,” held this spring and summer, featured artworks by 10 artists and artist groups highly visible on the contemporary scene since 2000. It took four keywords important for understanding Japanese art today—“relationship,” “everyday,” “media,” and “vernacular.”
Next, our autumn and winter exhibition, “The Contemporary 2: Who interprets the world?” asks how contemporary artists rooted in different cultures see and convey the state of the larger world beyond their community. In contemporary society, where “displace” and “crossover” cultures is becoming the normal state, relationships of all kinds are made fluid. Historical perspectives and social values taken for granted until now obtain new meanings, depending on who is doing the interpreting. This exhibition views the diverse artworks born explosively, particularly from regions peripheral to Japan, as “practices for living.” It examines how people living in the same age as we, yet in different time-zones and locations, look at the world.
Works of art are created by freely combining a wide range of materials and methods. They are unique and ambiguous and cannot be reduced to signs interpretable using simple A-B-C or other codes. An individual work is the product of the artist’s words and actions, something both deeply personal and collective. We might say that it expresses the artist’s conscious of the world with which the artists come to grips. What, then, should be our approach to creative expression produced in a different arena informed by a different cultural context? Following the postcolonial critique of the Western Europe-centered historical perspective that prevailed through the latter half of the 20th century, many artists are engaged in taking back the act of interpretation, to seek proper understanding of their works in their own languages instead of words and gestures borrowed from the West. With meanings from different cultures mingled together from innumerable different directions, we must be careful to note that who interprets them can profoundly change those meanings. A space in which visitors can create new empathetic links, Who interprets the world? is an exhibition devoted to artistic expression rooted in different perspectives, an experiment in using culture (works of art) to interpret our world.
Hiromi Kurosawa, Chief Curator 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
*Our exhibition title Who interprets the world? is a translation of the title of the book “Qui traduit le monde?” edited and prefaced by Majima Ichiro. (Jimbun Shoin 2005).