Lineament

source: fig2loyaltycardwordpress

“A boy shuts his eyes for a moment. When he wakes the world he once knew is gone. His room is an unfamiliar place. His language has failed him. he has forgotten everything and everyone he ever knew. Gone. The world he now lives in is one of lost things.” Text-HirakiSawa

From this terrifying conceit, Hiraki Sawa’s two-channel film “Lineament” draws us into a surreal world of dream-like continuity and disjuncture, in which we are taken from the familiar world and into the logic of the film. In the same way, in the corner of the ICA studio there is a record player playing the sound, a palindromic score, and on the screen we see the same record in different situations, playing on a beach, held up to the ear to try to listen to it without playing, or merging into someone’s head like a halo, or being played in strange rooms.therecord

Curator Fatoş Üstek has spoken of a desire to create a “continuum” through the 50 weeks of fig-2, with threads continuing through the whole year, incrementally resulting in a “subliminal constellation of meaning.” One of these threads is this week literally represented by thread. Throughout the film we see black string stretching between spaces and experiences. We see the vinyl record being played and as it is played, the outer grooves come away as string stretching off elsewhere, visually dramatising the ephemeral act of listening/apprehension as the vinyl disappears into thread, drawing off a three-dimensional artefact into two-dimensional string vanishing into the single dimension of a vanishing point.

This is itself interesting and beautiful, but it also ties into a primal theme in the production of art: the line. This is where it all began. Recent cave art has discovered abstract line drawing created by neanderthals half a million years ago, and pretty much all of what we think of as visual art can in some sense be reduced to ‘the line’. Cubism developed Cezanne’s theory that be everything could be broken down into cylinders, spheres & cones (lol note: not cubes). He thought these could then be shown to recede to a central point; note that another contender for oldest identified work of art is a single red dot made 40,000 years ago. recordhead

Fatoş Üstek has identified “stretching a line” as one of the themes of her intended “continuum” for fig-2. For Week 4, and, wait for it, next in line, we look forward to the poet Simon Welsh, whose basic building block for poetry is, of course, another kind of line.

What Hiraki Sawa does with his line is to desconstruct multi-dimensional space (ie. the record disintegrating into string) and then to repattern it according to a dream-logic that works by visual association and transformation. We see the string proliferating into series of lines coming down a wall. We see beautiful webs forming, which are then echoed by images of chandeliers and clocks and gears, radiators and plugholes. These are the visual vocabulary of the film, elements which are repeated in different configurations and which echo or transform into each other.

The string is pulled into strange machines made of outsized old-fashioned clock parts, which then join with the central character of the film, not physically but compositionally; we also see him as a soft machine with the string going into his head and out again through the ears.

The film enacts an attempt to reconstruct memory by contructing a new (sur)reality out of these abandoned objects all connected by a thread that is symbolic of silence: when the vinyl record has turned to string, all this is left is this connecting material, which is in turn symbolic of the order of meaning-making whereby, according to poststructuralist theory, objects (such as words) do not have inherent essences but are used to create meanings that exist between them rather than arising out of them.

This is how we construct and reconstruct reality every single day, constructing and reconstructing the present out of the forgotten lost things of the past. In the same way, I have constructed an at-this-precise-moment meaning for the film “Lineament” by connecting the objects according to ideas I am familiar with, arising from what they bring up from my memory. But really there is only the line, and clocks, and rooms, and the objects in those rooms. What they mean is whatever you can make them mean by drawing connections out from your amnesia. And now, perchance to sleep. The point about a nightmare is that you wake up.
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source: jamescohan

London-based, Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa’s videos explore psychological landscapes, unexpected worlds and the interweaving of domestic and imaginary spaces. Populated with animals, inanimate objects and people, his characters search for their ‘place’ in the universe as he explores ideas of memory, displacement and migration.
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source: shiseidogroup

Hiraki Sawa was born in 1977 in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture. In 1996 he enrolled in the Fine Art Foundation Course at the University of East London, then later went on to earn an M.F.A. degree in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College, also in London. Originally focused on sculpture, he eventually turned to video as his primary expressive medium. Having earned critical acclaim for his work dwelling in 2002, Sawa made London his home base and has been active ever since on the international scene. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Yokohama Triennial 2005, the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, the Chengdu Biennale in China, and the Biennale of Sydney in Australia. His work has also been featured in museums around the world, and he has participated in such exhibitions as Six Good Reasons to Stay Home at the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne, 2006), Artist File at the National Art Centre (Tokyo, 2008), Carrousel at the Musée du Temps and Musée National des Beaux-Arts de Besançon (France, 2009), and Sanso-Bigaku at the Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Museum (Kyoto, 2010).

Thus far, Sawa has drawn inspiration mostly from refreshing everyday happenings that he himself has experienced. In his earlier works, like dwelling (2002), elsewhere (2003) and trail (2005), he integrated familiar items found in his room at home ― a toy airplane, dishes, stationary supplies, animal shadows ― as allegorical images to create fantastic scenes within ordinary spaces, an approach that found wide appeal. In more recent years, he has been exploring and expanding the potential of video as an expressive medium, using multiscreen projections and sound effects situated in three-dimensional spaces to create installations that attempt to transform video from something merely watched to something physically experienced. For the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Sawa moved into new realms of expression with an installation titled O (2009), in which he interpreted feelings resonating within him during his travels around Australia’s aboriginal outback as turning, spiraling time intervals linked together and expressed in space using video and sounds.

Lately, inspired by the experience of a friend with amnesia, Sawa has been undertaking a new project called “Figment,” in which he inquires into the nature of memory and remembering. Interested in how the “gaps” that come from memory loss can rock reality, Sawa asks, “Doesn’t the fact that memory loss can make you forget even what certain foods taste like show how very dependent we are on memory?” In this latest new video installation, Lineament, Sawa gives us the figure of a man looking back on his memories from a room in which the borderline between fiction and reality wavers back and forth, drawing our attention to how ambiguous the idea of “normal” really is. In this exhibition, this work will be shown along with two others from the “Figment” series, did i? and sleeping machine.

This exhibition offers a fine opportunity to see this new approach by Hiraki Sawa as he moves from the expression of spiritual landscapes deeper into the realms of surrealism.
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source: white-screenjp

さわはこれまで、自身が体験した日常のささやかな出来事からのインスピレーションをもとに作品を制作して きたが、近年では、マルチスクリーンによる映像投影に音響効果を加え、それらを展示空間に立体的に設置することで、映像を体験するインスタレーションへと変化させ、映像表現の可能性を模索している。

日本では3年ぶりの個展となる本展では、新作「Lineament」を発表。半年以上かかりきりで制作したという力作で、友人の記憶喪失をきっかけに取り組み始めたプロジェクトだ。「記憶喪失になったことによって、食べ物の味すらもわからなくなるということは、いかに自分たちの日常が、記憶に頼っているかをあらわしているのではないか」と考え、本作品では、ある男が虚構と現実の境界が揺らぐ部屋の中で記憶を辿る姿を描き出す。

“正常”という概念が、いかに曖昧なものかということを考えさせる作品だ。
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source: doudonleblogfr

Projetée sur deux murs qui forment un angle, en deux grandes images différentes, cette vidéo montre un homme au regard vide (il me semble!) qui regarde sans doute sa vie défiler à travers des objets. Images d’engrenages qui évoquent horloges et temps qui passe. Images, surtout, d’étranges fils qui semblent vivants, qui s’enchevêtrent, s’enroulent, vibrent, s’autogénèrent, entrent et sortent de la matière … Les allégories sont assez évidentes (le temps FILE!!). Le décor où se déroule cette narration est délabré, laid et dénudé. Un climat de nostalgie. De regrets. Le film est saccadé, comme un vieux tournage des débuts du cinéma. Ce que j’ai préféré: donc, ces sortes de lignes tremblantes, ces traits incertains, ces fils infinis, qui brouillent l’image, jouent les toiles d’araignée, cousent les choses entre elles, forment des spirales, circulent comme des vers de vie!!!