SJCAGF met artist Yoshiko Shimada at her gallery Ota Fine Arts in Roppongi. Shimada just came back from London where she’s participating in the exhibition Art, Performance and Activism at the Pumphouse gallery, a show we mentioned earlier. The recent exhibiton stemmes from Art of Intervention, a cultural exchange program between Kyoto and London that was held in 2008-10.
Shimada is renowned for working on topics such as Japanese history, women, feminism, violence and nationalism. Her new works are based on East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front and are part of a larger project concerning alternative art education which she hope to launch at an exhibition in Europe in 2013. Shimada is, together with Alice Maude-Roxby, doing research on a project that will compare three different alternative art institutions, namely: the Intermedia Center at Iowa University (which was established by Hans Breder and Anna Mendieta), Bigakko (established by publisher Gendai Shicho-sha in 1969, where Shimada has both studied and teached) and Experimental Skolen in Copenhagen. Since 2011, Shimada is a PhD candidate in the Art, Design and Architecture Department at Kingston University in UK. She is particularly interested in Japanese performance art from 1960's and -70's.
Shimada is one of the first Japanese artists that we have met since we started this project that actually calls herself a feminist. Our discussion with Shimada focused a lot on the situation for feminism in Japan, both from a historical and a contemporary context. We hope that we can present some of the issues that came up at a later stage of this project.
No comments:
Post a Comment