The Unwritten Erotic Saga of the Simon Fujiwara Family

source: ccvafasharvardedu

Born in 1982 in London and currently based in Berlin, Simon Fujiwara has shaped a complex and rich practice that interweaves performance, film, sculpture, and text into highly immersive environmental installations. Bringing personal experiences (both real and imagined) into contact with broader historical, social, and political topics, his expansive practice has been described as an “autobiographical journey through the architecture of modern life—constantly rebuilt as it is retold.” His exhibitions and projects function as theatrical frameworks where players—family members, real-life friends, historical figures—and events cohabit and interact, generating situations where the real and the imagined are not easily discernable. Often appearing himself or shifting into various guises within his works, Fujiwara’s narratives destabilize, reperform, and thus reconstitute notions of truth, authenticity, morality, and the credibility of the artist as narrator, leveraging new perspectives on issues such as sexuality, globalism, and race.

Simon Fujiwara
Fujiwara studied architecture at Cambridge University and Fine Art at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions at institutions including Tate St. Ives, UK; MoMA, NY; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kunstverein Braunschweig; and SFMoMA, San Francisco. His participation in international biennales includes Venice, (2009), Sao Paulo (2010), Gwangjyu (2012), Shanghai (2012) and Sharjah (2013).
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source: dvirgallery

SIMON FUJIWARA

Born in 1982 in London, Simon Fujiwara spent his childhood between Japan, England, Spain and Africa.
In dense dramas about personal relationships, family relations, politics, architecture and history, Fujiwara’s work explores biographies and ‘real-life’ narratives through a combination of performance, video, installation and short stories.
Often appearing within his works himself and assuming various guises from anthropologist to erotic novelist, he also works with a cast of friends, family members and collaborators, presenting versions of themselves and their own biographies as characters within his dramas.
In linking fictional and real people, locations and events he explores the boundary between the real and the imagined, often revealing the very fiction of such distinction.
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source: andrearosengallery

Born in 1982 in London, Simon Fujiwara spent his childhood between Japan, England, Spain and Africa. In January 2012, Tate St Ives hosted his first major solo survey exhibition ‘Since 1982’ which was held in his hometown of St Ives and accordingly featured six of his key autobiographically charged installations. In 2011 Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer theatre showed his first theatre work The Boy Who Cried Wolf which incorporated three of his acclaimed performances into a full three-act play which subsequently toured to New York’s Performa 11 Biennale and San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. His works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world including Toronto’s Power Plant, New York’s MoMA, Artonje Centre, Seoul, and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale, Shanghai Biennale among others. His installations are in museums and foundation collections including the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Prada Foundation, Milan and the Tate collection, London. In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Baloise-Art Prize at Art Basel and the Cartier Award at Frieze Art Fair. He has published two artist’s books, The Museum of Incest and 1982.