Sophie Utikal, Hana Usui Event

EXTENDED
until 14 May

SOPHIE UTIKAL
There Is No Separation

ERÖFFNUNG: 3. Februar, 11-18 Uhr

SOPHIE UTIKAL
There Is No Separation
4. Februar – 9. April

HANA USUI
A Human Desert, Made by Humans
kuratiert von Walter Seidl @ FOTO WIEN
4. Februar – 18. März 2022

SOPHIE UTIKAL
There Is No Separation
Curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
04 Februar - 18 March 2022

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

With the exhibition ‘There is No Separation’ Neuer Kunstverein Wien is pleased to present a solo show by the artist Sophie Utikal. The expansive in situ installation of hand-sewn textile works navigates the viewer through a liminal space filled with ambivalence and uncertainty. On fabric panels several metres high and wide, figures applied with powerful stitches explore threshold experiences, surveying the in-between zones of different states, as well as the intertwining of topographies and temporalities. Dedicated to those whose biographies are usually underrepresented, Utikal’s works focus on the body and its language:

‘My art is for those whose biographies are not represented in media or in a structural way: First, second, third generations of migrants in Germany, hybrids who constantly fall out and have to re-establish their own worlds. I believe that it is necessary to be seen in one’s own complexity in order to be. I believe that there are many different worlds at the same time that are interconnected. When my world ends, so does yours.’

To look at these fabrics is to look through windows into landscapes where groupings of women have gone together to the end of the world, where they are now building a new life, knowing that they have already left one (or many) behind. They are aware of this, but it no longer plays a decisive role in shaping the now and the future, in shaping their own persona.

‘Whether I actually mean others by it or myself in the diversity and contradictoriness of my character is less essential than the encounter with–and in–each other and oneself.’

If Utikal’s paintings were a novel, we would have quite a few main characters.
A family of people, brought together by choice, who know they are vulnerable, who know they are human, who know that they themselves occupy only one-twentieth of the image they inhabit. What surrounds them is just as crucial as what they are. This is about connectedness, belonging and shared existence.

HANA USUI
A Human Desert, Made by Humans
Curated by Walter Seidl
04 Februar - 18 March 2022

In the framework of FOTO WIEN 2022, Neuer Kunstverein Wien is presenting a series of works by Vienna-based Japanese artist Hana Usui dedicated to the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011. ‘A Human Desert, Made by Humans’—the title of the exhibition originates from Konrad Paul Liessman’s text on Hana Usui’s Fukushima series; a reflection on the nuclear catastrophe documented by the artist. Usuis works will be embedded in the artist’s latest installation ‘Why can’t we play with the sand?’, specifically made for the current exhibition.
On March 10th at 6 p.m., the curator of the exhibition Walter Seidl will be holding a photo review as part of FOTO WIEN at Neuer Kunstverein in Vienna. A discussion, hosted by Judith Brandner (ORF journalist, Japan expert) with the artist, Konrad Paul Liessmann (philosopher and university professor) and Marcello Farabegoli (curator) will be taking place on March 18th starting 7 p.m. Location and/or zoom link will be announced soon, pending COVID19-guidelines.

‘The works by Japanese artist Hana Usui are dedicated to the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident in 2011. The artist, trained in Japanese calligraphy, oscillates between drawing and photography in her work and combines moments of manual practice with a pictorial reality.

In the series ‘Fukushima’, created in 2019, Usui addresses moments of the invisible brought about by the nuclear disaster and poses the question of how changes in the landscape unfold over the years and affect visual memory. Usui’s black-and-white photographs are overlaid with semi-transparent paper and covered with black lines. This process results from Usui’s drawings, which also contain a photographic element due to her recording of movement and development processes, as if they were photograms or stills. She brings the visual component of the cloudlike ink washes to the photograph by applying the thin layer of paper, whereby the artist tests the validity of the statements made by the photographic dispositive. She employed the same technique in 2018 in her photo series on the death penalty in Japan, titled ‘Tokyo Koshisho’.

Although condensed into concrete images, in Usui’s photographic views the actual motifs of the depicted surroundings are only recognisable to a small degree. Thereby the artist addresses Japan’s relationship with negatively charged phenomena, which politicians refuse to admit and therefore try to visually ban from the public space. The artistic investigation of such endeavours not infrequently leads to forms of censorship. With her special technique the artist anticipates potential censorship models and while doing so attempts to artistically articulate the essence of Japanese thought.’

Text: Walter Seidl