Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary｜21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Information

Period:

2021.4.29(Thu.) - 2021.9.26(Sun.)
10:00-18:00（until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays）

Venue:

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Galleries 7–12,14

Closed:

Mondays (Open on May 3, Aug. 9, Sep. 20, ),May 6, Aug. 10, Sep. 21,

Admission:

Adults ¥1,200 (¥1,000)
Students ¥800 (¥600)
18 and Under ¥400 (¥300)
65 and over ¥1,000

*Prices in parentheses for groups of 20 or more and tickets purchased online Tickets include same-day-only admission to concurrent Collection exhibitions: “Scales” (October 17, 2020–May 9, 2021) and “Inner Cosmology” (May 29–November 3, 2021)

About purchasing dated-entry tickets：
Admission will be restricted to a specific date to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Please purchase a ticket for the desired admission date in advance on the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa website.
・Select your desired admission date and purchase a reserved ticket.
・Show the QR code screen from your purchase or a printout of the page in order to enter to the exhibition.

Book tickets here

For More Information:

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Phone: +81-76-220-2800
E-Mail: info@kanazawa21.jp

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

Related Programs

To be announced after April 1 on the Museum website

Exhibiting artists
(in alphabetical order)

AOKI Ryoko + ITO Zon
IWASAKI Takahiro
KOMORI Haruka + SEO Natsumi
KOYAMADA Toru + KOYAMADA Kazuki
SHITAMICHI Motoyuki
TAKADA Akiko & Masako
TAKEMURA Kei

About the artists

AOKI Ryoko ＋ ITO Zon, Installation view at the exhibition:
WORKSHOP FREE MOLECULES METAMORPHOSES,
The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020
Photo: IMAI Noriaki

AOKI Ryoko + ITO Zon

Aoki (b. 1973, Hyogo) chiefly makes works combining multiple drawings featuring flora and fauna, while Ito (b. 1971, Osaka) renders chains of images in embroidered lines. When presenting work as a unit, the pair join their respective offerings loosely in installations often consisting of serial animations on themes such as improvised art-making in the gallery space, or human development. In this exhibition they will present works that draw out the possibilities of acts of "making" grounded in people's everyday lives, such as knitting and gardening, based on their work for the Reborn-Art Festival, of which they have been a part since 2017.
IWASAKI Takahiro, Reflection Model (Ship of Theseus), 2017
Collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
©Takahiro Iwasaki, Courtesy of ANOMALY

IWASAKI Takahiro

Born 1975 in Hiroshima, Iwasaki Takahiro is known for works that challenge viewer perceptions by taking the likes of historic buildings, pylons and cranes, shrinking them, and replacing their materials with others of different textures and robustness. In this exhibition, Iwasaki will use new works with a tagasode (lit. “whose sleeves?) motif and others to suggest an ordinary altered by the pandemic, and at the same time, highlight an ordinary that takes change on board and thus persists, through the work Reflection Model (Ship of Theseus), in which real and mirror images of the damaged Itsukushima Shrine are constructed from cypress.
KOMORI Haruka ＋SEO Natsumi, The Visible World Shrank, 2020
Photo: KAWAJIRI Ryoichi
Coutesy of Sapporo Cultural Arts Community Center SCARTS

KOMORI Haruka + SEO Natsumi

Video artist Komori (b. 1989, Shizuoka), and Seo (b. 1988, Tokyo), who uses pictures and text in her practice, joined forces after the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, and since then, shifting their base from Rikuzentakata to Sendai, have produced works that scrutinize changes in the Tohoku landscape, listen to the stories of the people who live there, document and relay those stories. Here they will present a work consisting of a video capturing the real voices of young people in Tokyo "after the quake and before the Olympics" and "during the pandemic" plus words and pictures by Seo, and a chronology of the pandemic.
KOYAMADA Toru ＋ KOYAMADA Kazuki, Daddy Bento, 2017
Collection of the Artist

KOYAMADA Toru + KOYAMADA Kazuki

Koyamada Toru was born in 1961 in Kagoshima. From 1984 to 2000 he was part of the collective Dumb Type, which he helped form while at university, and from the 1990s also developed numerous shared spaces for people to come together, converse, and build relationships. His work relies heavily on the technique of bricolage, in which the people assembled in a place come up with ways to utilize objects found on-site. This exhibition will present bricolage-type activities undertaken from day to day by Koyamada and family, and works such as Daddy Bento and Pilgrimage, Make-Believe Play emerging from collaboration with his daughter Koyamada Kazuki.
SHITAMICHI Motoyuki, Mother's Covers, 2012
Collection of the Artist

SHITAMICHI Motoyuki

Born 1978 in Okayama, Shitamichi homes in on unusual things buried in the day-to-day, such as wartime relics, boulders washed up by tsunami, and bridges over narrow canals and ditches in city streets, carrying out exhaustive research on these finds and presenting the results in photos, video, and text. At this exhibition he will present works that track unusual scenes people are unaware of amid the ordinary, and the kind of creative acts people engage in unconsciously, in a display centered on the works Mother's Covers, which captures the act of his mother-in-law appropriating items that happen to be at hand for lids, and 14 years old 凹 and 凸, in which middle school students were asked to research the phenomenon of broken things in their homes being fixed or compensated for by other objects.
TAKADA Akiko & Masako, Knitting Needle, 2019
Collection of the Artist　Photo: NAGATSUKA Hideto

TAKADA Akiko & Masako

An artist unit consisting of twin sisters born in Kyoto in 1978. Taking small everyday items, pieces of clothing and so on, and modifying them by means such as carving and embroidery to form motifs and landscapes of a totally different scale, the pair's works have an inherently evocative, lyrical quality. In this exhibition they will place works in a gallery arranged to look like a room in a house, a tacit nod to the suffocating sensation of being housebound by the pandemic, yet at the same time creating a space that gives a feel for the gradations between odd and ordinary, and the links we have with the outside world even when physically separated from it.
TAKEMURA Kei, Renovated: T. Family’s Light Bulb,
Performance view at Yokohama Triennale 2020
Photo: KOBAYASHI Yukinobu
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

TAKEMURA Kei

Born 1975 in Tokyo. In her "Renovated" series in which the artist wraps broken or "wounded" everyday objects in semitransparent fabric and embroiders over the damaged parts, and installations overlaying embroidered white cloth on drawings and photographs, Takemura attempts to capture things such as memories and landscapes prone to being forgotten, things that change, and objects that break, like household items, through the act of stitching. Here she will present works from the "Renovated" series made using glowing fluorescent silk thread, and also repair works on-site at irregular intervals throughout the exhibition.

Exhibition catalogue

Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary

Includes installation views of the works in the exhibition.
Design: OHARA Daijiro
Publisher: Seigensha
Release date: June 2021 (tbc)
Price: ¥2,500 (tbc)