Midori Mitamura
24 Nov 2006 - 22 Jan 2007
MIDORI MITAMURA
November 24, 2006 – January 22, 2007
“The emotions that the events of daily life give rise to cannot, by and large, be recorded but live only within our memories.” (Mitamura)
Midori Mitamura’s works situated between photography and installation quote elements from her own past or that of others, which she then uses to lay bare modes of memory and the remembering repetition of private biography. The installations and fictitious spaces created by Mitamura juxtapose staged photographs with found photo material, video works, music, and private memorabilia such as items of furniture and clothing that are associated with the artist’s past. In Two o’clock afternoon, at the hill on a windy winter day (2001), she meticulously rebuilds a bookcase from her parents’ apartment and fills it with objects of private remembrance; and in Inventions – Sunny Flat Days (2000) she presents amateur photographs from 1950s Japan to the rhythm of Bach’s Inventions. With subtlety, precision, and irony, Mitamura probes the fraught realm between private, personally charged memory and objective memory, between history as it is lived and as it is reconstructed in retrospect, pointing to the fleeting and elusive nature of personal experience.
Midori Mitamura (*1964) lives and works in Tokyo.
November 24, 2006 – January 22, 2007
“The emotions that the events of daily life give rise to cannot, by and large, be recorded but live only within our memories.” (Mitamura)
Midori Mitamura’s works situated between photography and installation quote elements from her own past or that of others, which she then uses to lay bare modes of memory and the remembering repetition of private biography. The installations and fictitious spaces created by Mitamura juxtapose staged photographs with found photo material, video works, music, and private memorabilia such as items of furniture and clothing that are associated with the artist’s past. In Two o’clock afternoon, at the hill on a windy winter day (2001), she meticulously rebuilds a bookcase from her parents’ apartment and fills it with objects of private remembrance; and in Inventions – Sunny Flat Days (2000) she presents amateur photographs from 1950s Japan to the rhythm of Bach’s Inventions. With subtlety, precision, and irony, Mitamura probes the fraught realm between private, personally charged memory and objective memory, between history as it is lived and as it is reconstructed in retrospect, pointing to the fleeting and elusive nature of personal experience.
Midori Mitamura (*1964) lives and works in Tokyo.