Finissage Hana Usui: Electric Shadows Event

‘Finissage’ on Saturday 29 April, 11 am - 4 pm
Exhibition extended till 5 May 2023
curated by Chiara Giorgetti

The exhibition Electric Shadows of Hana Usui makes us fall within a double sentiment: a motionless world of black devastation, a gloomy no-go zone and at the same time it leads us in the playfulness of sunny days and a soft awakening place of the consciences.

Outside of Kunstraum Feller we are greeted by color images, photographs of a harmless natural landscape of life-giving fields, in which, at the same time, the Buhonice nuclear centre, about 100 km from Vienna, looms ominously. A countryside that introduces the evocative and dual atmospheres of the interior.
In the room on the left we walk inside shadows, signs, emerged and submerged lights in a juxtaposition between dark and dazzling areas, glares in a growing sense of finiteness. These series of artworks which bears the same title of the exhibition “Electric Shadows” are not disconnected from visual balance and lyric images of Usui’s personal black and white atmospheres, but at the same time they open up to new visions with a cycle of re-meditated images and thoughts. In these drawings-photographs we find barely visible ink washings and black oil lines that groove the papers and shine through the photographs of the shadows of Tokyo’s playful above-ground electrical networks. This interaction remember life and how humans live and respect nature, the artist’s observation is a moment of grace, it let yourself be carried away by the enchantment of the shadow lines, time is fixed in a moment with the indirect gesture across a paper diaphragm. The tools and materials are chosen and used to communicate with the observer driven and manipulated in a constant and delicate manner, soft but rich, ethereal but physical, the oily traces are evidence of a constant, gentle but struggle desire poised as the shadows of atomic figures of people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From “No More Fukushimas” (a project for Vienna Art Week in 2014), her artistic research has acquired suggestions arising from a partial negative world, the Japanese one, as much loved as it has always been felt from a western perspective as hostile towards the quality of life and the emotional well-being of its citizens. A country that is wonderful by nature, has a very high and fine culture, but at same time violated by some cruel laws and intolerant traditions. Usui has always been against the use of nuclear energy and since 2014 she has started producing artistic works related to political and social aspects, over the years the need to tell the injustices linked to the reckless choices of Japanese politics has increasingly defined itself up to this epilogue exhibition where the intentions of rebirth and research for a possible way out are suggested by the overlapping of lyrical images and emanated by a sort of meditative silence and aura.

The immersive installation in the room on right presents scenes from “failed apocalypse”, a series of photographs on the walls testify the presence of the artist inside the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant, which never went online thanks to Austrian protests. We are with Usui inside that place and observe, grope in the darkness of a blackout that can have disastrous consequences for a nuclear centre. We search possible answers that the artist seems to suggest by providing the visitor with a hand crank torch to illuminate the room and marking a core zone with four yellow-black cones. Being aware, observing and reflecting on our actions seems to come as a message that is both evocative and ethical. How much progress given by the development of human intelligence can really guide us towards better scenarios for humanity? So what is the artist’s function if not to bring us closer to the beauty of life and nature offering creative perspectives, inspiring new ideas, and sparking critical thinking? Leaving the exhibition and seeing the colour photos of the Buhonice nuclear power plant again, we have another chance to re-read the experience lived inside: positive and negative are complementary, just as black and white and colour do not necessarily have pre-established communicative characteristics.