Last Friday, Andrea Rosen Gallery dimmed its lights to open an expanded version of Studio Pietà (King Kong Komplex), the first New York solo exhibition by artist British-born Simon Fujiwara. The autobiographical multi-media installation's focal and narrative epicenter is a video projection in which Fujiwara stages an interview with himself explaining the process of re-creating a photo from his childhood. Fujiwara relays the memory of seeing his mother swept up in the arms of a "charming and dangerous" Lebanese boyfriend on a beach outside of Beirut, where she worked as a cabaret dancer at Casino du Liban.
The interview progresses into Fujiwara explaining how his attempts to physically re-stage the moment—selecting the models, constructing the set, and directing the actions—shifted his project's focus from personally intimate to globally complex. When re-imagined outside of the immediate narrative of his mother's life, the photographed moment becomes a larger platform to consider both recent and historical sociopolitical tensions between the West and the Middle East.
This projection illuminates a microcosmic representation of the entire process: a table with two chairs, studio lights, and a mound of sand and rocks—symbolic and theatrical in their collapsed presentation. Three photo boards comprised of casting process images, religious sculptures, and Middle Eastern cultural products and events flank the installation, further blurring the distinction between the intimate and international. The final photos are divorced from the process-driven installation, exhibited in their own space. Fujiwara's final rendering reverses the photo's origins, instead suspending the man in the arms of the woman—masterfully mapping larger questions of both sovereign and sexual power onto two bodies born of a personal memory.
Image courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Through August 9, 2013
ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
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The interview progresses into Fujiwara explaining how his attempts to physically re-stage the moment—selecting the models, constructing the set, and directing the actions—shifted his project's focus from personally intimate to globally complex. When re-imagined outside of the immediate narrative of his mother's life, the photographed moment becomes a larger platform to consider both recent and historical sociopolitical tensions between the West and the Middle East.
This projection illuminates a microcosmic representation of the entire process: a table with two chairs, studio lights, and a mound of sand and rocks—symbolic and theatrical in their collapsed presentation. Three photo boards comprised of casting process images, religious sculptures, and Middle Eastern cultural products and events flank the installation, further blurring the distinction between the intimate and international. The final photos are divorced from the process-driven installation, exhibited in their own space. Fujiwara's final rendering reverses the photo's origins, instead suspending the man in the arms of the woman—masterfully mapping larger questions of both sovereign and sexual power onto two bodies born of a personal memory.
Image courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Through August 9, 2013
ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
MAP
