03.02 at 18:00
NART, Joala 18
Free
On 3rd of February at 18:00 Ikuru Kuwajima will have a pop-up exhibition opening and an artist talk.
Ikuru is one of three NART winter residents, a Japanese artist and photographer who has been living and working around Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the past 17 years.
At NART, he is showcasing a project about the Baltic Sea, which he has been working on since 2019. It is a series of chigiri-e Japanese-style collages, the idea of which is based on the text of Bruno Taut, a Konigsberg-born German architect, who was in exile in Japan for a few years in the 1930s.
Bruno Taut escaped from the Nazi prosecution in the 1930’s and spent the rest of his life in Japan and Turkey. While traveling along the Japanese northwestern coast, he discovered that the Japanese landscape — the thatched roofs, sand, pine trees and sea — resembled the Baltic coast around his homeland East Prussia, now divided into Lithuania, Poland and Russia. A few years ago Ikuru followed the footsteps of Taut in Japan and found that Taut’s impression is still relevant. Later he photographed along the Baltic coastline from Poland to Estonia, made photo-based paper collages, applying the traditional Japanese Chigiri-e technique. The series of the triptychs is his interpretation of the gaze of the exiled architect nostalgically remembering the Baltic coastline from the other shore in Asia on the threshold of WWII, which drastically changed the geography and demography of the Baltic region afterward.
Photo: Masha Pryven
