地平線に目を向ける ー視点の変化 // EYES ON THE HORIZON

8th (Sat) – 16th (Sun) April, 2023

Venue: BUoY

49-11, Senju-Nakacho, Adachi-ku, Tokyo

In cooperation with: Mouri Lab, GA Department, Tokyo University of the Arts

Supported by: The Daiwa Foundation

Artists: gnomad, Jamie Janković, Shinji Kamijo, Mei Kashiwayama, Emily Mulenga, Sputniko!, Petra Szemán, Moka Takeda, Christian Wright

Curators: Catherine Harrington, Petra Szemán

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【Statement】

A view of the horizon through a train window is never a static image. As you move with the train, trees and buildings slide in and out of the frame; and sometimes the train dives into a tunnel flashing and flickering with light beyond the window glass. The horizon may seem like a fixed point, yet it is perpetually fragmented, interpreted and re-interpreted by the viewer and their position. By moving through present time and space, the horizon shifts; continually expanding to include new realms of possibility. Glancing towards the horizon then, is a future-facing action that in turn possesses worldmaking powers.

In his 2009 book “The Anime Machine”, Thomas Lamarre considers how trains can reproduce the animation-viewing experience; that is, the sort of animated image that is produced in the gaps between the speeds enabled by railway travel and the limited ability of the human perceptual system. (Endnote 1) Paraphrasing Norman McLaren, the core kinetics of animation take place not in the content of the frames, but rather in the spaces as one frame flips to the next. In this way, animation-by-train creates a different, fragmented way of seeing. Animation scholar Deborah Levitt calls particular attention to such fractured and discordant viewing experiences, and rather than concealing them she urges us to enhance them, as it is in “the hinges or gaps between microworlds and identities that allow us to see and attend to virtuality as well as to create new worlds”. (Endnote 2)

“Eyes On The Horizon” brings together the works of artists who seek out different, fragmented worlds, whether it is the interpersonal worlds of fandom, spaces of queer communality, or virtual realms. In this quest, the artists persist in looking forwards, never quite settling. This final exhibition in the series features the artists: Jamie Janković, Shinji Kamijo, Mei Kashiwayama, Emily Mulenga, Sputniko!, Petra Szemán, Moka Takeda, and Christian Wright.

Sputniko!’s work “Menstrualverse”, enters into virtual spaces to ask how gender is performed by avatars, and who should design virtual worlds and what the bodies within them are capable of. Offering a Menstruation Machine as a wearable in digital space, the work presents questions about what it might mean to acquire the ability to perform menstruation as a digital avatar, or conversely, what it might mean for the Metaverse and other virtual domains to be places where menstruation and other biological and identity-based rituals are censored.

Both Emily Mulenga and Christian Wright’s video works tread between the overlapping worlds of contemporary art, animation, fandom and avatars. Mulenga’s film “Main Character” follows ‘Bunny’ as the end of a relationship slingshots her into reflections on the nature of being and of reality, with the film itself flipping between 3D visuals, 2D animation and live action footage. Filmed within the video game Dark Souls III (2016), Wright’s epic “Body Language” also fixes on a relationship; this time between two online players and how they communicate using the shonky limitations of game design and gameplay.

Made in 3D virtual space during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Moka Takeda’s work “What is a Landscape?” interrogates the idea of landscape itself, and asks if any landscape we see can ever really be “seen”, or if we are only recalling our own memories of a landscape.

Meanwhile, Shinji Kamijo’s work attempts to narrate the landscape of the ‘other’ and others’ time, by re-creating his own gaze into the rooms of a building across the street; imagining the life stories of the people he sees within that ‘rear window’ view.

Mei Kashiwayama’s paintings narrate queer and non-binary figures in a landscape. Queerness for José Esteban Muñoz is a “horizon of being” (Endnote3) that can be glimpsed in utopian bonds, affiliations, designs, and gestures that exist within the present and with a kind of “forward-dawning futurity” (Endnote 4). We can sense these bonds and glance to futurity in the gentle resistance and persistence of Kashiwayama’s work.

Moving towards other, queer horizons in game-space, Jamie Janković’s work “A Woman on the Internet (or, The Eternal Scream)” is a journey into how queer/trans players and travellers in games can find both limitation and freedom; while Petra Szemán’s interactive game “The shape of worlds to come” interrogates ways in which genderqueer/trans* desire might offer as yet-undefined future spaces of being. Composing a world through gesture and story-telling, gnomad’s compelling performance practice builds on similar themes to find liberation in alternate, binary-traversing horizons of being.

Translation: Yume Morimoto

Endnotes:

Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine, pxiii
Deborah Levitt, The Animatic Apparatus, p.123
Drawing on Husserl.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p23