An exhibition of a famed Japanese artist at PinchukArtCentre
The PinchukArtCentre continues bringing world-class contemporary art to Kyiv. This time it presents Japanese artist Mariko Mori and her “Oneness” exhibition. Her work is included in the collections of prestigious institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Israel Museum in Tel-Aviv, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Italian Prada Foundation, The Los Angeles County of Museum Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. Her first large-scale museum exhibition in Ukraine will display photography – both early and recent works, drawings, and displays. The highlight of the exhibition is the all-encompassing interactive display, “Wave Ufo.”
One of the best-known Japanese artists of the international scene, Mariko Mori, born in 1967 in Tokyo, envisions fantastical worlds and beings in spectacular photographs and videos, frequently making herself the main character of these scenarios, in which she appears in images in styles reminiscent of Bjork, the eccentric Icelandic singer.
Mori studied fashion design in Tokyo, briefly worked as a model and later studied fine art in England, and this early education is visible in her elaborately produced photographs, videos and sculpture that resemble Hollywood as much as contemporary art.
Mori makes use of elements from both Japanese and Western art history, which she then combines with influences from modern popular culture, design, fashion, music, manga, and science fiction. This is especially visible in works such as the large and spectacular architectonic display “Wave Ufo” (1999-2002). “Wave Ufo” is a hybrid object, machine and sculpture all in one. It represents the synthesis between the various categories of travel: three-dimensional, spiritual, and temporal. The visitor is invited to enter the “Wave Ufo” to make a mental journey in which the brain waves of the travelers are realistically reproduced and are a component of a vision-like computer animation.
Her recent work involves exotic landscapes, computer-generated images and choreographed performances for which the artist designs her own costumes and plays the central characters. This extraordinary exhibition offers a retrospective of Mori’s entire works, and is the first to present the complete “Beginning of the End: Past, Present, Future” – a photographic cycle produced over a period of 11 years, in which Mori presents herself as a time traveler in a plexi-glass capsule at significant symbolic locations, from Giza to New York to Shanghai.
A significant part of the exhibition deals with Mori’s search for the cosmological experience of our forefathers. For this purpose, she visited and documented all kinds of megalithic monuments in both Japan and Scotland. These formed the basis for photographs and a series of high-tech displays. These works, which continuously change color, such as “Transcircle” (2004), are a present-day translation of their ancient models.
Mariko Mori herself arrived in Kyiv to help manage the exhibition and put together a special display, the details of which are closely guarded secret until the unveiling ceremony.
PinchukArtCentre (1/3-2A Baseyna, 590-0858)
From April 12.
