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17/3/2008

Miyako Ishiuchi

Langhans Gallery, Prague

curated by Machiel Botman

Langhans Gallery Prague has organized the first European retrospective of works by the Japanese artist Miyako Ishiuchi (b. 1947).

She attracted attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale for her series Mother’s, but a cross-section of her work has never been shown before. The curator of the exhibition is Machiel Botman. In conjunction, a book is being published by Manfred Heiting. The exhibition will then move to the Foam museum, Amsterdam, La Filature Scéne Nationale-Mulhouse, and other institutions in Europe.

The exhibition is a cross-section of the photographer’s works from the 1970s to the present. Langhans Gallery is showing photos from the series Yokosuka Story (1976–77), Apartment (1977–78), Endless Night (1978–80), 1.9.4.7 (1988–89), 1906 to the Skin (1991–93), and Mother’s (2000–05).

In the beginning there are the harshly provocative black-and-white photographs of the island of Yokosuka (Yokosuka Story, 1976–77), in which Ishiuchi has captured the place where she spent almost her whole childhood. It is a place imbued with the presence of a US military base. The series Apartment (1977–78) depicts a decrepit home: a one-room flat with a cramped space for cooking, shared lavatories, long, dark hallways. Endless Night (1978–80) is a similarly saturnine series. Again there are the faded rooms with mouldy walls and remnants of garish decoration. It evinces a painful past – these are rooms in which prostitutes spent endless nights. In the photos Ishiuchi seems to have discovered the now invisible, original women inhabitants. In their rhythm the contrasts of light and dark evoke the beating of the human heart.

Ishiuchi was born in 1947. 1.9.4.7 is the name of a series of portraits of women born in that year. She does not find the expression of their personalities in their faces, but in far less conspicuous parts of their bodies: in the soles of their feet and palms of their hands. The natural impudence of these subjects may be testimony to their attitudes to life – some hands seem to want to communicate, others appear weighed down under an invisible burden. Ishiuchi has penetrated to the essence, making visible the connection between body and character.

1906 to the Skin (1991–93) – this unusual title contains concealed within itself two pieces of information: Ishiuchi has depicted the dancer Kazuo Ohno (born in 1906) to show only the skin of various parts of his body, never his face. She observes the textures of the old man’s skin, capturing it in such detail that the photos become almost abstract crops. One gets from them a feeling of admiration: ‘his skin is unusually beautiful. It is smoother than silk, warmer than wool, suppler than cotton, stronger than canvas.”

The subject of mothers and daughters has appeared in Ishiuchi’s work from the very beginning, and devotes herself exclusively to the topic in the series Mother’s (2002–03). She began to photograph her own mother systematically in the last years of her mother’s life. The result is provocative photos of a naked body. After her mother’s death her most intimate things, like underwear and makeup, remained abandoned. Ishiuchi began to photograph them in an attempt to come to terms with her mother’s death, to unchain herself from the past, and to understand better the bond with her mother.

The exhibition has been put together by the Dutch curator and photographer Machiel Botman, an expert on Japanese photography. Among the exhibitions he has curated in the past are Izis/Chagall at the Jewish Museum, Amsterdam, 1993, with Leo Divendal, and Wonderland for the Noorderlicht Photofestival, 1999.

Langhans Gallery
Vodickova 37 - Prague

stampa

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