TANA
Gallery Bookshelf
TOKYO | KANDA
| 101227 | SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE VIVA Co. 2010.12.27 (Mon) |
SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE, a loose collective of artists and non-artists, will hold their one-day exhibition at TANA, simultaneously connecting and disconnecting the space with contemporary surveillance technology.
ARTIST INFORMATION
An alternative space and our home, SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE is a sharehouse in Shibuya ward, usually dwelt by 10 people, as well as a contemporary art project having lasted for two years. As an alternative space, SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE opens its living room for events like party, workshop, or group reading. The members are those learning phillosophy, sculpture, comic-making, theater performance, dance, video art, media art, wood print or fashion, also including people like a nightclub host or a model with mental disorder. Mixing up their networks at random, SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE ordinarily accomodates extraordinary events beyond the borders of genres.
In October 2010, we covered up our house with a "cloth" and happened to get expelled by the landlord, rushing out from our home as if fleeing by night. We discovered our new home in Ebisu in November and held "SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE Triennale". We'll keep on driving ahead...
EVENTS
2010.12.27(Mon) 16:00-18:00
SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE x Ushiro Ryuta [ChimPom]
Talk Session & Discussion
(Language: Japanese)
| Appx |
The notorious gangkids SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE cunningly sneaked their one-day exhibition at TANA with an installation / performance utilising two sets of wireless surveillance cameras and monitors.
They installed each set of the surveillance systems in the gallery space and a small room nearby in order to make a circuit of mutual gazing, appropriating the originally unidirectional surveillance system into bidirectional one. Then barricading the room with a huge silkscreen of their logo mark, they made the room into their satellite camp and constructed a unique spatiality that disconnects the two spaces physically and connects them only optically. While visitors watched them hanging around in the room through the monitor inside the gallery, SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE squatters watched the visitors watching them through the monitor inside their camp.
Once fused into a circuit, the surveillance system subversively reconfigured communication and visualised its fundamental asymmetry and limitation, where one is firmly connected to its counterpart but never capable of sharing the same view, inherent to any type of communication with a varying extent. Deliberately restricting the channel of communication, however, the circular surveillance inspired people on the both sides to discover the very asymmetry and limitation as something rather potent and constitutive. Is mutual surveillance still surveillance, or something else? Will the con-fusion of surveillance circuits undermine the fortress of panoptic gaze?
The title "VIVA Co.," originally a wordplay after the name of the building BIGAKKO, in which TANA is situated, may represent their fundamental drive to celebrate "co"-working, such as commons, community, coexistence or communication above all. At the talk session the founder of SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE told that their housing project began as a piece of conceptual art "to open the house to anybody", then effectively turning private and public inside out and mixing them together. Having welcomed anybody to drop in, SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE has hosted diverse networks in one place, cultivating survival tactics toward a convivial life style beyond comfortable but impotent homogenuity.
(L to R, the third, second and first representatives of SHIBUYA = SHIBUHOUSE; Taiki, Toshikuni and Keita, reviewing their activities at the talk session)
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