Visceral Sensation — Voices So Far, So Near

Visceral Sensation — Voices So Far, So Near
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
April 27, 2013 – September 1, 2013

Our organs contain life memory and life rhythms from the far distant past, according to anatomist MIKI Shigeo (1925-1987). Miki’s observations of human behavior, senses, and emotions have profoundly influenced diverse fields. This exhibition will ponder Miki’s views and take “visceral sensation”—the most primeval and fundamental of the human senses—as an aid to appreciating contemporary artworks that converse with the voices of life within us and induce new perceptual awakenings.
Featured will be 13 artists and artist collaboratives from Japan and abroad: Louise BOURGEOIS, CHO Shinta, Nathalie DJURBERG & Hans BERG, KATO Izumi, KUSAMA Yayoi, Ana MENDIETA, NAKAGAWA Yukio, Saskia OLDE WOLBERS, OLTA, Pipilotti RIST, SHIGA Lieko, Bill VIOLA, and WATANABE Kikuma. All, as artists, consciously or unconsciously explore the sensations, perceptions, and emotions emanating from our primordial physical embodiment, or respond to the life rhythms resonating silently in our organs, the axis of our physical being. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, video, picture books, architecture, installation, and performance, they manifest these inner voices in their artworks.
Today, when our fears of environmental and socio-economic collapse are becoming real—as demonstrated by the anxiety and discomfort we have known, concerning radiation, since the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster—what do we feel in our bodies; what are our bodies saying? This exhibition will be a place where visitors, prompted by the sensations they experience in their encounter with each artwork, will tune into, feel, and ponder the “voices so far, so near” that speak within and around them as people of an uncertain age.