23 – 30 September 2014
Hiraki Sawa
did i?
2011, 9’13”
SYNOPSIS
A boy closes his eyes for 25 minutes and wakes up with the world gone from behind his thoughts. His language slips and shifts, he tastes orange juice without knowing anymore to describe it as sour, he likes numbers but cannot put names to faces. His room is filled with a thousand records and many more. He sees the records, unable to listen. He can’t see the floor, has never seen the floor beneath them, wouldn’t recognise it if he met it in the street. He meets people in the street and his only option is to trust that they know him when they say they do. His records become opaque, circular slabs of the unknown and the unknowing. A fog of landscapes without contours, without borders, that can only be read by touching. To move forward he must step out, one foot then the other, and believe that he is indeed moving. His mind like an emptied lake, the sky welling upward and outward, unable to contain the depth of it all, the bottomless, fathomless wealth of the things he lost in his sleep.
Text by Dale Berning.
BIOGRAPHY
Hiraki Sawa’s video installations present intimate observations in transitory landscapes, familiar surroundings often inhabited by anoetic forms. Trees growing from a table, or a clock suddenly endowed with legs are natural interventions made by Sawa, yet extraordinary and unpredictable for the audience. His use of animation, sharp attention to lighting, and meticulously composed shots, are amalgamated into layered works. Sawa has the ability to manipulate his imagination into a tangible dimension that sits between the parallel languages of sculpture and film.
Hiraki Sawa (born 1977, Ishikawa, Japan) received his BFA from the University of East London and his MFA from the Slade School of Art at University College, London. Sawa’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Chisenhale Gallery, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Saint Louis Art Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie et Musée du Temps de Besançon with Le Consortium, Dijon.
Full biography from Paraffin Gallery available here
FIGMENT
Figment is an ongoing project that encompasses the film did i? Figment is a collection of works that comprises of a group of increasingly surreal videos about the phenomenon of amnesia. The series takes its inspiration from, and is an ongoing means of processing, the sudden-onset and complete memory loss of one of the artist’s friends. So far the project consists of three ambitious videos: did i?, sleeping machine and Lineament
Lineament is available to view here courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.
FILMOGRAPHY
Envelope, 2014
Lineament, 2012
Souvenir III, 2012
Sleeping Machine I, 2011
For Saya, 2011
Figment: did i?, 2011
Figment: Record, 2010
O, 2009
Small Metal Gods, 2009
Out of the Blue, 2008
Hidden Tree, 2007 Hako, 2007
Unseen Park, 2006
Trail, 2005
Eight Minutes, 2005
Going Places Sitting Down, 2004
Airliner, 2003
Elsewhere, 2003
Migration, 2003
Spotter, 2002
Dwelling, 2002
LINKS
Hiraki Sawa interview for Animate Projects
Hiraki Sawa interview at James Cohan Gallery
Hiraki Sawa: did i? by Coline Milliard
CREDITS
A film by Hiraki Sawa
With thanks to Rie Nakajima and Elliot Dodd
Carroll / Fletcher would like to thank Abigail Addison and Animate Projects for their collaboration in the programming of this season of films