Venue:
National Pavilion
Giardini di Castello

Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe

Artist:

Miwa Yanagi
* Kobe, Japan. Lives in Kyoto, Japan.
more info & photos

Commissioner: Hiroshi Minamishima
Professor of Joshibi University of Art and Design and former Director of the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto

Miwa Yanagi plans an installation titled "Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe" to be shown at the Japan Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

With a black, membrane-like tent, the Takamasa Yoshizaka-designed Japan Pavilion will be transformed into a space of contemporary time representing the fluidity and mobility of "death." Before long, the old young women that are familiar characters in Yanagi's work will, like visitors from another world, appear in Venice. But when they do, they will reassume their huge, life-sized forms, which until that point had been kept under wraps, and completely cover our small "lives" as observers. Enclosed in huge frames, the photographs that the women inhabit are nothing less than life-sized images of "death" as it is. The "death" within these women, which should be small, is a transposed world that emerges when one recalls their actual size. They disappear at the moment one becomes aware of this transposition as Yanagi tries to reassemble this theatre, which has once again begun to wander, in Venice.

(From a press release on the official website)

Website: www.jpf.go.jp/venezia-biennale/art/e/53/index.html

Organizer:
The Japan Foundation

See also in Universes in Universe:

Japan - Venice Biennale 2007
Masao Okabe

Japan - Venice Biennale 2005
Miyako Ishiuchi

Japan - Venice Biennale 2003
Motohiko Odani, Yutaka Sone

Japan - Venice Biennale 2001
Yukio Fujimoto, Naoya Hatakeyama, Masato Nakamura

Japan: Art
Systematic directory of annotated links.

Japan - artist's index
All the artists from Japan in Universes in Universe.

Japan: Cultural Exchange
Institutions, support programs; cultural exchange with 27 European countries.