Stalemate

source: nadjavilenne

Born and raised in Japan, Suchan Kinoshita was twenty years old when she went to Cologne to study music at the institute where the contemporary composer Maurizio Kagel teaches. Later, she worked for a theatre company where the members alternated the roles of actor, set builder and director. It is therefore not a coincidence that her work is always on the borderline: both inside and outside the walls of an exhibition space, with or without the public’s active participation, recognisable as an artwork or camouflaged. Kinoshita’s plastic works are a fusion of several art disciplines. Throughout her oeuvre, we can find elements from theatre and experimental music, two fields she was active in for quite some time. Duration (time) and the conscious approach to the spectator are two of the most important aspects in her creations. Inbetweening is not a static installation. The entire space changes several times a day following a strict script. Curtains move, lights change, and music starts to play. Suchan Kinoshita’s work emphasises movement, space and time. The plastic installation is a kind of performance of a score, a theatre-like space for monologues and a puppet show, where different realities slide into each other nicely. In Kinoshita’s installations, time and the sequence of events play a crucial role. This makes the creation changing and unpredictable.

The central element in Inbetweening is a turning stage for one speaker to give a monologue, based on prescribed words. The moment a word disappears and a new one is displayed on panels around the turning stage, is determined by the speed of the moving stage. At STUK we get to see both the stage and the set, built around it, with curtains, pieces of furniture, props and projections. Some of these objects, such as a disco-ball or flowers are central characters in the installation. Previous to Playground Kinoshita recorded several films in the space, both from actors on the turning stage and from objects that were presented in a particular way. The installation Inbetweening resembles some sort of backstage area as well as a storage room or a setting just before or after a certain event, an ‘inbetween’ space that is constantly shifting. In the wooden boxes the films Kinoshita shot in the space are presented. In the big pavilion the new 18 minute film Inbetweening brings together bits from all the other films. (Source: STUK, Leuven)
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source: frieze

Suchan Kinoshita persistently continues to put forth messy, investigative proposals in the manner of the early 1990s – showing a blaring predilection for process and institutional critique. All of this can be seen in ‘First Marriage’, the artist’s first major retrospective, at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Antwerp (MuHKA). Personal proposals woven into inviting, occasionally interactive, installations filled the gallery with groping lo-fi meanderings. But the show also transformed the entire ground floor of this architecturally dated museum – a transformation no doubt welcomed by a museum that justifiably complains of its awkward 1980s redesign – and questioned museum protocol and visitor conduct. It was a perfect marriage.

Kinoshita’s revisions took the viewer through a mystifying network of plywood cabins, look-out posts and constructed confines that either opened to wide empty spaces or closed in on themselves. These works involved the architecture of the building, but in a way that simply recognized it as a point of departure. Where all this was leading was far more complex and had much more to do with the poetic mechanisms of human relationships – with life – than with any formal deconstruction of space.

The confusion started outside. Only after walking around the building did it become apparent that the wooden construction was in fact an artwork hiding the main entrance. Sure enough an arrow, easily overlooked, pointed to a narrow emergency exit, one of two temporary entrances. But only inside did it become clear that Kinoshita, and not some random workman, was responsible for these sly shifts. Greeted by a makeshift, desk-like construction, we were assured by a museum employee (who could just as well have been an actor) that we were indeed in the exhibition. To the left, in a round room, a puzzling series of open shelves with a collection of odd things, a kind of memory storage, stood across from a polystyrene partition from which hung a red frilly dress (Staubstelle, Dust Site, 1995). Small labels were stuck along the walls, but instead of offering the viewer titles or explanations, each listed just a date and a name. Although these names refer to curators, museum directors and artists whom Kinoshita knows, they were, more importantly, actors in a dream she had 15 years ago. In it she was surrounded by all the people she had ever met, who convened in one space and one time in her head. The date underneath the name is the day when in reality they first met. These names and this dream are a thread throughout the show, linking older works with more recent ones, in terms of concept as well as form. This dream of meetings is analogous to a notion of ‘auditorium’, a place where one comes together with others to listen or be listened to, to act or react, to watch or to be watched.

The labels lead to the next space, where three desks, each with a typewriter and stacks of paper, were neatly lined up. An enigmatic animated film of a ticking clock was projected on to the opposite wall. The room was Kafka-like in its suggestion of futile bureaucracy.

The analogue ‘brain’ of the show, a work called Observatoire (Observatory, 1998), was in the hall of the closed main entrance, whose glass sliding doors were still uselessly operating. Here the official central reception was still a functioning workplace (or were they all actors?) but was engulfed by a series of open shelves, an archive of details referring to other parts of the exhibition. The visitors inside this ‘brain’ witnessed a noisy collapse of order – museum, viewer, maker, participant – and all found themselves thrown into an Kabakovian world (though minus his trademark nostalgia), where Janet Cardiff’s theatricality met the sincere but twisted integrity of an early Bond bad-guy-scientist, wrapped up in ManfreDu Schu-like dirty process.
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source: defamilienet

Suchan Kinoshita is een Nederlands beeldend kunstenaar met Duits/Japanse achtergrond, die zich beweegt op het snijvlak van hedendaagse muziek en theater. Ze houdt van het loslaten van verwachtingen, van verwarring en misverstand en het niet-begrijpen. Immers: “Begrijpen is overgewaardeerd, we zouden beter kunnen uitgaan van het niet-begrijpen en toch een relatie tot de dingen hebben.” Met deze houding maken filmmaker en kunstenaar deze film, of eigenlijk ’15 pogingen’ daartoe.

De filmmaakster wordt tijdens deze humorvolle ondernemingen onderdeel van de beschouwing van Kinoshita, want ‘concrete poëzie is dat wat naast je staat’. Iedere poging komt dichter bij de kern van haar werk: dat de verwarring waarin de pogingen uitmonden ruimte geven aan een verrassende kijk op het bestaan.