Loop
Exhibtions: Port Gallery T, Osaka (JP) / Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE) / Wassermühle Trittau (DE)
Images: Catalogue “Observer Effect“
Loop
Exhibtions: Port Gallery T, Osaka (JP) / Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE) / Wassermühle Trittau (DE)
Images: Catalogue “Observer Effect“
„When rays of sunshine fall obliquely onto the pattern of a lace curtain, the perforations of the fabric are condensed into a graceful shadow image for a moment, its delicate structure gaining visual substance. Stylized blossoms stand out against surfaces, walls, or the floor as dark negative inversions: a brief reflex of light that manifests itself on the margin between presence and absence, substantiation and dissolution. This phenomenon has inspired the Hamburg-based Japanese artist Naho Kawabe to begin an open series of fragile floor pieces that is still in progress. In her reinterpretations of the evanescent play of shadows, she renders the ornamental structures of curtains through the no less ephemeral medium of coal dust. Permeable drapes from second-hand shops, which Naho Kawabe has collected over the years and through which she gently sifts the coal dust, serve as stencils for these works. Like black snow or pollen, the powdery material collects in the fabric’s interstices, leaving scrolling floral contours on the underlying surface. The slightest breeze would instantly obliterate the image and make it vanish. Yet, for the duration of an exhibition or in the photographic document, in which the artist additionally captures it, it has permanence(…).
In principle, Naho Kawabe uses mass produced draperies ‚that tend to be ugly, kitschy, and of lower quality‘ (Kawabe) as templates for her delicate coal prints, which, however, through aesthetic translation, transformation, and sublimation — the artist speaks here aptly of a ‘metabolic shift’ — permutate into mysterious (dream) visions: an effect that is still enhanced by the specific illumination of the works through natural or indirect artificial light, which at times lets the motifs glow as if by means of an autonomous internal source. The immaterial phenomenon of light is concretized, as it were, without which the perception and recognition of the visual, object-related reality is impossible, and simultaneously addressed in its intangibility (…).
Indeed, the coal works’ ethereal, black-and-white negative images also reveal visual parallels to the media film or rather photography. Naho Kawabe’s diaphanous adaptations of the incidental shadow play of a curtain pattern on the wall are like snapshots of briefly appearing ‚traces of the encounter with light‘ (Sadovsky 2005). Roland Barthes has defined photography as ‚an image that has been revealed, has ‘emerged’, ‘arisen’, been ‘squeezed out’ (like the juice of a lemon) through the effect of light’ and gives that, which is effervescent and has long been absent, duration as an “emanation of a bygone reality.“ The ephemeral is thus inscribed in the photograph, which according to Barthes represents “an image that has been rubbed off of reality,’ (Barthes 1980) in an essential manner. In her shadow images that bear witness to light, Kawabe subtly gives palpable shape to the idea of an image ‚rubbed off of reality.’ However, in doing so, she also implicitly questions the stability and reliability of this reality. In her potentially ephemeral coal prints, in which the gaps in the texture of the ornamental fabric become perceptible, her objective is not least the ‚visualization of the invisible’ (Kawabe): an aesthetic leitmotif pervading her work oscillating between light and shadow.“
in: Naho Kawabe. Observer Effect, Berlin 2013, p 15-24.
2013, Revolver Publishing
19 x 12 cm, 145 Pages
Languages: DE, EN, JP
Hrsg.: Naho Kawabe
Text: Klaus Plöger, Belinda Grace Gardner, Waltraud Brodersen, Ludwig Seyfarth
Interview mit Ami Okabe
Design: Mitsugu Mazobata
Order here: Revolver Publishing (Berlin)
Sautter + Lackmann (Hamburg)
Waitingroom (Tokio)
ISBN 978-3-95763-079-7
ISBN 978-3-86895-297-1 (old ISBN)
Observer Effect オブサーバー・エフェクト
2013, Revolver Publishing
Thread, book glue, all “I” – words from the book “The Stranger” (Albert Camus, 1942)
Exhibtion: Port Gallery T, Osaka (JP)
Port Gallery T, Osaka (JP)
Charcoal, glass, wood, each 40 x 30 x 5 cm
Exhibtion: Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE)
Image: Catalogue “Observer Effect“
Online-Performance, 5’30
At the end of the video Perfect Pitcher #1—Song for the forbidden zone, I let the final scene of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker appear briefly as a film still. It shows the view behind the family onto a deserted landscape and a monstrously threatening industrial plant on the horizon: a nuclear power plant. The melancholy of this image pervades the entire video, for the flaming red and cold white flickering of light in combination with the recitation of Hazuki Ogoshi, a musician with perfect pitch, may refer to the catastrophic end of an era. The strangely nervous exposure technique, which mirrors my agitated state, results from the fact that I placed the small web camera in my mouth. Thus, shock and protest were quasi on the tip of my tongue, and my body became the instrument of recording.
A conversation between Aomi Okabe and Naho Kawabe. October, 2012
in: Katalog “Observer Effect“
Exhibtion: FOLD Gallery, London (GB) / blinkvideo.de
Image: Catalogue “Observer Effect“
Shiseido Garelly, Tokyo (JP)
Images: Broschüre “Shiseido art egg 05” / Catalogue “Observer Effect“
Charcoal, spotlight, size variable
Exhibitions: Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (JP) / Märkisches Museum Witten (DE)
Images: Broschüre “Shiseido Art Egg 05” / Catalogue “boesner art award 2012” / Catalogue “Observer Effect” / Book “Transitorisch“
Wood, metal, raffia, projector, spotlight, video (HD, 8’06, loop)
Based on an original fetish figure of the Mbete tribe in Gabon, which at the same time serves as alter ego of the artist herself, Naho Kawabe expresses her search for the definition of existence in the room-sized installation Why am I here? Kawabe originally discovered the figure at a Hamburg curio shop called Harry’s Hamburger Hafenbasar & Museum, where it was placed together with other fetish figures from different countries, detached from its original function and significance. The figure had probably travelled accidentally to Hamburg by ship and ended up as a “seafarer’s treasure” at the bazaar on Reeperbahn where it stood around as one curio among others, stripped of its cultural context. In Kawabe’s installation, the figure finds itself in another, completely foreign context. Originally a fetish and transplanted into a constantly changing spatiotemporal constellation, the figure raises questions about the stability our self-positioning that is still possible today. Why am I here? confronts the viewer with questions of cultural belonging, border crossings and, in a general sense, the existential question how the coordinates of space and time help shape our identity concepts.
Text by Magnus Pölcher
in: Fuzzy Dark Spot. Videokunst aus Hamburg. Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg
Exhibtions: Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (JP) / Ermekeilkaserne, Bonn (DE) / Deichtorhallen Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg (DE) /Kunsthaus Hamburg (DE)
Images: Broschüre ” Shiseido Art Egg 05″ / Catalogue “Observer Effect” / Catalogue “Fuzzy Dark Spot. Videokunst aus Hamburg” / Catalogue “INDEX 11”