Introduction: So you think you are the audience.

 

  In a traditional art exhibition the audience can assume that they are the audience and nothing else and safely enjoy the artworks from a distance.  It is also often assumed that there is a definite meaning that an artwork already possesses, which the audience only need to discover.

  The artworks, however, only begin to have meanings when the audience start to describe them and incorporate the experience of seeing them into their own lives.  In this sense, all artworks are interactive and, unless we actively construct their meanings, they remain silent.  But, once we impute a meaning to an artwork, we bring about a division between the work as an object or something to be gazed at and ourselves as the audience, or the subject.  Through this process, we begin to think that artworks have fixed meanings which we only need to discover. In this exhibition, all three of us are trying to destabilise the division between the artworks and the audience as well as our own position as artists.

 

  Yukiko Tasaki’s work has been created in the interactive ‘space’ between herself and the subjects of her photographs and videos.  All her works are the records of the relationships between herself and her collaborators.  And, through her installation, we can ‘join in’ their conversations in a process of looking and reflection.

   Toshie Ise T. provides us with a space where the audience can interact with the artworks and create a unique moment that will never happen again.  Her works have neither a fixed appearance nor a meaning and it is up to you, as the audience, to create them.

   My work asks the audience to reconsider their social position.  With one project, I ask the audience to attend the workshops and create the exhibits and to show a cast of their body, e.g. their hands, as a part of the work.  So who is the artist, or the audience?

 

  The works in this exhibition are not objects simply to be gazed at or understood, but events in which you perform.  So, please come closer, investigate, and perform!

 

  In order to realise this ambitious project, we were helped by countless individuals and have received generous support from following organizations: the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Sasakawa Foundation.  Yukiko has been supported by the Japan Foundation as an artist fellow.  I have been supported by the West Midlands Arts, PSP Dental Co. Ltd., Brown McFarlane, OakBray and Trillogy Co. Ltd.   This exhibition would not have been possible without their help and support.

 

Thank you everyone.

 

Miho Suganami   

June 2001

 

 

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