Yoshinori Niwa: Delayed Hypothesis – From A to B

27 June 2016 > 15 July 2016 Alkatraz Gallery kindly invites You to the opening of the exhibition Delayed Hypotesis: From A to B by Yoshinori Niwa, tonight, 27th June, at 9pm, at the Alkatraz Gallery, ACC Metelkova. The curator of the exhibtion is Jani Pirnat.

Yoshinori Niwa is an artist, performer and an activist who performs interventions in socio-political situations in public place as well as in institutions. His performances are documented by a camera, following his action, so the common characteristics of his content-wise persuasive documentary videos is motion among different targets and interviews at these locations. He performs absurd economic exchanges and performative contrary actions. He demonstratively walks against the flow of the crowd in a protest. In shops he buys his own things, the things he has brought from his home. He brings a bag of rubbish from his home in Tokyo on board of an airplane and drops it off in Los Angeles. He keeps changing Euro into Turkish Lira and back into Euro at exchange offices in the streets of Istanbul until they are exchanged into nothing. Like a pickpocket in a Manila street he plants money to unsuspecting victims ….

Yoshinori Niwa has devoted the recent years to research of the history of communism, which is systemically marginalized in Japan. Personally he has not experienced the Cold War or a communist-socialist reality, but through the research of the current post-communist transitions he is interested in historical views and the conditions needed for the realization of a new social system. In the Japanese art world he is labelled as problematic, he has been accused of being hyper-political which has, according to the opinion of some of the local expert public had an impact as a lack of aesthetic expression of his products. So the artist has bypassed locality and sought his opportunities outside his native country and eventually found approval also in Japan. As a prolific and vigorous artist he received a Future Greats award from the Artreview magazine in 2014.

Similarly to Yoshinori Niwa’s constant moving around the world and in his videos, is the exhibition in the Alkatraz Gallery conceived in such a way to make a visitor move around the place. One needs to bend over and crawl into the space in the middle of the gallery. In much the same way the artist was bending down over the puddles in his performance Transferring Puddle A to Puddle B, 2004, in which he slurped a puddle in former East Berlin and spit it out on the square in West Berlin. He carried out a performance in a similarly demonstrative manner after the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima eight years later. He transferred a »clean« puddle from Tokyo into Fukushima. From puddle to puddle, from A to B - the exhibition guides us between the video Tossing Socialists in the Air in Romania, 2010, where the youth without any historical experience, from some stories that have been told, makes up a ritual of acceptance of a new communist member into the party, and the artwork entitled Proposing to Hold Up Karl Marx to the Japanese Communist Party, 2013. In both works Yoshinori Niwa with simple gestures and questions discloses the conformist stand of the members of present communist parties, as well as the hypocrisy of superficially interpreted Marxism.

Yoshinori Niwa – born in 1982 in Aichi Prefecture in Japan. He graduated at the department of video and performance at the Tama University in Tokyo in 2005. His international artistic career began precisely with the Transferring Puddle A to Puddle B work in 2004, which marked also his performative style. He has taken part in a series of large group exhibitions: Contemporary Art from Japan (Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Haifa Museum of Art, 2012), Aichi Triennale 2013 (Aichi Arts Center, etc 2013), Roppongi Crossing 2013: OUT OF DOUBT (Mori Art Museum, 2013). Among his solo exhibitions, the following deserve a special mention: Historically Historic Historical History of Communism (Edel Assanti, London 2015, Never Trust in People without Contradiction, (1335MABINI, Manila, Philippines, 2014), The Poetics of Activism (Gallery Alpha M, Tokyo, 2010), Communicating with Thieves (HIAP project room, Helsinki, Finland, 2010), 2009 Transforming Puddle A to Puddle B, (Art in General, NYC, USA). In 2014 he received the Future Greats award from ArtRewiev magazine.

http://yoshinoriniwa.tumblr.com/xxx , niwa@niwa-staff.org
Curator: Jani Pirnat, ivanpirnat4@gmail.com, 041 922 782

A lecture entitled Interventions by Outsiders, where the artist will present his method of work and his experience in research of the communist heritage on the terrain will be held on Tuesday, 28^th June 2016, at 7p.m. at the Projektna soba Zavoda SCCA – Ljubljana (Project Room of the SCCA – Ljubljana, at Metelkova 6.