The NJP Art Center has created a discourse on ‘performances in museums.’ Now in 2011, the Center will focus on the ‘here and now’ of performance art, the attributes of the on-the-spotness, in order to redefine and rediscover performance’s concept of space. This project, subtitled ‘Discovery of Space,’ explores the museum space that goes beyond the audience’s expectation, the space between performers and the audience, or a new space which seems to move backward in time.
11. Ujino The Rotators 7/20 6:30pm, 7/23 6pm
Ujino’s The Rotators is a human scale drum machine using the technologies of rock n’ roll, a kind of sound sculpture/performance project which he could create out of locally sourced second hand
parts, e.g. DJ turntable, electric guitar, blender, hair dryer, power tools, wood furniture, car and so on. Ujino had opportunities to combine them in many locations throughout the world, as a sort of cross cultural project in a globalized world. Its genesis lies in the mass consumerism, the disposable culture he was raised within, up until 1989, with the end of a Japan that thrived economically. Inside him, a shallow, lightweight optimism cultivated through that times and a feeling of shame directed at the consumption and wastefulness of today exist side by side, and this serves as a driving force behind
this work.
12.Okkyung Lee Eternal Turning 7/20 6pm, 7/23 5pm
Okkyung Lee, a New York based artist, has been developing her own voice in a contemporary cello performance, improvisation and composition for more than a decade. With her solid classical training as a foundation, she incorporates jazz, sounds, Korean traditional and pop music, noise with expanded
techniques creating her unique blend of music. Eternal Turning, now on display for the first time in this exhibition, began with the artist’s thought on breath. “From there endless variations of this breath turned into sounds, noise, humming, grunts leading eventually to languages, songs which are all used to express all facets of human emotions. (…) In Eternal Turning, written for 3 performers, this very basic unit of all human communication gets developed, turned around, broken apart and redefined mixed with noise and sound in order to present something that’s utterly expressive of human emotions that cannot be named in any other ways.”
(Excerpt from the Artist’s Notes)
13. Heekyung Cho Wind Dance, 7/21-22, 8/5-6, 8/12-13 4pm
After majoring in painting in college, Heekyung Cho received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at School of Dance in Korea National University of Arts.
Cho studied and worked with the innovative dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin from 2008 to 2009 and in 2011, and was selected for the residency program at Seoul Art Center Hongeun in 2011. During this festival, the dancer plunges into the space of the NJP Art Center with her Wind Dance and arranges a meeting between nature and space. The audience could not only experience natural movements of waves, trees and bird expressed through the human body as another nature, but also feel their own body not by keeping the separation between the performer and themselves, but by being required to involve in the performance multilaterally and sensuously. Wind Dance is composed of three different dance performances with three different themes such as waves, trees and birds, each not exceeding one hour and being one performance a day.
14. Atsuhiro Ito V.R.S.S.2011 7/29, 7/30 5pm
Atsuhiro Ito, an installation artist and the Optron player, has produced installation pieces using fluorescent light tubes since the 1990s. In 1988, he created an instrument which produced the discharged noise of a fluorescent light and named it the Optron with which, then, he started to give live performances. After 2000, he was invited to various solo and group exhibitions both inside and outside of Japan. His live Optron performances is known for its originality to stimulate both hearing and sight regardless of the sound volume or the size of the performance venue,
whether live houses or large clubs, or even genres, whether rock, jazz, or club music. He does numerous collaborations with sound artists from different countries and aesthetic orientation and also plays in bands such as “Optrum” and “ULTRA FUNCTOR.”.”
15. Akumanoshirushi Carry-In Project 8/6 5pm
Akumanoshirushi, meaning “the symptom of the devil” in Japanese, is a name inspired by “Symptom of the Universe,” an album title by the British rock band Black Sabbath. As the members got together to discuss and materialize the ideas of their leader Kiguchi Noriyuki from time to time, they began to attract public attention as a unique performance group to embrace various elements of drama, performance, music, contemporary art, etc. About their Carry-In Project, a project to collectively move a huge object which is to be performed in this festival, they explain as follows: “I could say, what designates how people act on stage usually is the director and its script. But I believe scripts are not the only thing that gives people certain moves. For instance, what if you have to emplace an extremely huge and complex-shaped object into a space? -in that case, the weight and the shape of the object themselves
could be the script for the performance in terms of determining how people move.”
16. Hyun-Suk Seo Desire Paths 8/12-13 7pm
Frequent footfalls amount to become a “desire paths.” Erosion becomes a guide for solitary trespassers through deep forests or lawns in the city.
Participatory performance DESIRE PATHS is a journey on a dim desire path inside the dense forest of the traveler’s mind. Unknown byways behind the “information super-highway,” the path will take each traveler to an uncharted ocean of intimate data. Will this be a daring exploration, or another shameless case of exploitation?
