Take Ninagawa is pleased to announce the opening of new and recent works by the New York- and Berlin-based multimedia artist, Ken Okiishi. This is the artist's first exhibition with the gallery.
The exhibition title, "(Goodbye to)," references Okiishi's feature-length video mash-up (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010), which itself references both Woody Allen's 1979 homage to a disappearing and illusory New York, Manhattan, and Christopher Isherwood's 1939 short novel set in Weimar-era Germany, Goodbye to Berlin. Made over the course of three years between 2006 and 2009, Okiishi's video plays upon New York and Berlin as interlocked projections of desire and aspiration in the contemporary drive for artistic self-realization. Combining sampled footage from the original Manhattan with new footage shot by the artist in Berlin with a pared- down cast of actors drawn from his circle of friends and collaborators, it further incorporates dialogue derived from the re-translation into English of the original film's German subtitles.
As Okiishi's introductory exhibition to Japan, "(Goodbye to)" now adds a third term to this complex superimposition, Tokyo, or, rather, with the name of the city now voided, a potentially infinite accumulation or substitution of new terms. On display will be (Goodbye to) Manhattan and an accompanying group of lobby cards in which new images of New York are collaged together with the original film's lobby cards so as to deface Allen's romantic and celebratory vision of the city and its inhabitants. Also included are works made using found images of the apartment on West 67th Street in Manhattan where Marcel Duchamp lived from 1916 to 1918, as posted to the real estate listing website StreetEasy.com. These works are part of a broader project remapping iconic Manhattan spaces.
In their deliberately jarring and corrupted aesthetics, both groups of works address a distinctly contemporary sense of displacement and longing for both the near past and the near future. With the excitement and uncertainty provoked by recent developments in social formations and technology, we find ourselves torn between wanting to reenact the lives of our predecessors, which are so seductive because they are already mapped out, or to reinvent ourselves in new contexts – from the physical space of a new city to the disembodied space of the Internet – where we believe conditions will be better. Rather than idealizing one or the other, Okiishi reveals the sublime awkwardness of always living in the present.
About the Artist
Born in 1978 in Iowa, the United States, Ken Okiishi completed his BFA in 2001 at Cooper Union, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Alex Zachary, New York, and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin. In 2011, his (Goodbye to) Manhattan was screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2009 he was included in Performa 09, the visual art performance biennial. He has participated in group exhibitions at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Camden Arts Centre, London; and Contemporary Art Museum St Louis.
