Soft opening reception: 5PM, Saturday, December 3, 2022
Artist Talk and energy-free live: 7:30PM, Sunday, December 18, 2022

ASAKUSA is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Japan by Austrian artist and filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind (1972-), the time is now. The latent power of space in architecture and landscape that transmutes society has political implications on human behavior while also contributing to the formation of personal identities. Holzfeind’s oeuvre of video, photographic, and installation works speak of her painstakingly thorough research exploring the socio-political impacts of twentieth century architecture based on utopian ideologies, functionality, and rationality.

The exhibition, the time is now., presents a two-part video installation produced by Holzfeind in Japan. In the Inter-University Seminar House complex designed by architect Takamasa Yoshizaka, a protégé of Le Corbusier as well as a major pioneer of Japan’s modernist movement, the shamanic improv duo IRO, Toshio Orimo (1946-) and Shizuko Orimo (1944-2019), invoke spirits in a ritualistic performance as well as an improvisation. Alchemized by clashes and fusions of music, art, and daily activities, the two endlessly co-create and explore the potential of the relationship between man and woman in an animistic rather than a patriarchal framework. With these small practices of resistance, they do not intend to change society or the world, rather, these are acts of civil disobedience in order to resist being governed.

At a time when small tectonic shifts are occurring in many parts of the world due to the ever-accelerating shaking of institutional foundations laid down in the name of modernity, this exhibition poses the following questions: In an East Asian nation that has undergone a series of political, economic, social, and cultural transformations due to rapid modernization in the late nineteenth century, how have the supernatural, the feminine, indigenous animism, and masculine modernism been internalized and expressed in the process of collective identity? How does this dichotomy support and transcend the process of individual and social internalization? Can stories of individual disobedience and resistance in historically landscaped images dismantle and agitate the entrenched whole and reconcile it with the cosmic ecology?

On the occasion of this exhibition, a talk by the artist Heidrun Holzfeind and philosopher/anarchism researcher Motonao-gensai Mori will be held on Sunday, December 18, following an energy-free live performance by Toshio Orimo of IRO and shakuhachi player Sabu Orimo. For more information, please visit our website.



Heidrun Holzfeind (b.1972)
Studied art history at the University of Vienna and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and in New York, currently based in Berlin, Holzfeind’s interest in modernist architecture and the function of social utopia inherent in society has led her to explore the relationship between history and identity, personal narratives and political narratives through video, photography, installations and artist books. She has been invited to exhibitions and screenings at museums and festivals around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (Mumok) in Vienna, and the Istanbul Biennial. She has received high acclaim in Austria and elsewhere, including the Camera Austria Prize and the Austrian Arts Council Outstanding Artist Award.

IRO
Shamanic improvisation duo formed in 1981 by the married couple, Toshio Orimo (1946-) and Shizuko Orimo (1944-2019). At the time of its formation, they performed in eruptive, high-energy improvisations that added elements of punk noise to free jazz. Shocked by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, they exchanged their electric instruments for analog, unplugged or “energy-free” ones. Influenced by indigenous sounds and Shinto rituals, they developed their own interpretation of the kagura dance/ritual, which they call “punk kagura,” performing ritual and dance at shrines throughout Japan. Their musical explorations go hand-in-hand with their activist involvement in peace and anti-nuclear movements and their free-spirited way of life that vehemently rejects commercialism in all forms.