Ken Kitano|Others From the Future / Quiet Hand

Dates|August 17 – 31, 2021
Venue|MEM map
Hours|13:00 – 19:00
The gallery is closed on Mondays that are not national holidays. (Except when Monday falls on a holiday, in which case the gallery is open and closed the following day.)
Telephone|+81-3-6459-3205

 

Others From the Future is a series of portraits of babies using the photogram technique. The series started from a chance meeting with an obstetrician who was intrigued by Kitano’s our face, a series of complex portraits where the face of each portrait is a superimposed image of many faces from specific cultural groups. She suggested that he shoot newborn babies at her hospital. Kitano thought this project could be a sequel to our face because of the overarching theme of the mortality.
He regularly went to shoot babies at the obstetrician’s hospital and the project resulted in several large-scale color photograms. In 2019, six photograms from the series were exhibited in the group show, from the cave, using two rooms at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

 

In this exhibition, in addition to Others From the Future, Kitano will present his latest project Quiet Hand, which is a group of concrete mold sculptures formed from the hands of his family. The sculptures are covered with numerous tiny photographs of his domestic life.
When the COVID-19 pandemic begun in 2019, Kitano, who had never dealt with family as a subject matter, started photographing his family who were confined in the house. Their communication shifted to one that was closer: physically, verbally, and nonverbally. At the same time, he felt a tangible boundary between his family, which seemed to integrate into one entity, and the outside world. Then, he made a mold of his wife’s hand and next his daughter’s and then his mother’s. With these molds, he used concrete to cast sculptures of his family’s hands. This work was very intuitive for Kitano who compared this process to photography; the mold was the film negative, and the casted sculpture was the positive of the transferred image. The project was a welcome disruption to the ennui of their family’s daily routine, and became an opportunity for them to work together.
Quiet Hand is one example of how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed perspectives of the world and shifted the boundary between self and others, family and society.

 


【New Publication】

New photo book by Kitano published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Ken Kitano “Others from the Future”

Size|290×200mm
Page|68 pages, 18 plates
Publisher|bookshop M