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On “Oral History”
2013/06/10
For r:ead I started a project named “Oral History”, a project in the form of interviews with passersby on the street that asks people to talk about their knowledge of Japanese history before and during World War II. We conducted guerilla interviews with about seventy people in the areas of Ueno Park, Ameyoko, Yoyogi Park, Shinjuku, Tokyo Tower, Shin-Okubo and Asakusa. To keep the identities of the interviewees hidden, we filmed only their mouths with a video camera, creating, as the title suggests, a situation where “mouths” (oral) tell “history”. I worked on the project with the idea to develop it further into a film.
Seeking a New Frame
2013/02/21
In the r:ead session held in December, I came in touch with many varied artworks and opinions of the participating artists – Jisun Kim, Chia-En Jao and Ning Li, as well as the r:ead project team, including Ms. Soma. We had a great discussion over the relationship between art and politics.
Meiro Koizumi
Japan
Born in Gunma prefecture in 1976. Currently resides in Yokohama.
After his graduation from the International Christian University (Tokyo), he went to London to study film at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. In 2001 he was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Film and Video. In 2003, he was a resident artist at the ARCUS Studio in Tochigi prefecture for six months. From 2005, he moved his base to the Riijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. At that same time, he also received a bursary from the the Government Overseas Study Programme for Artists (Agency of Cultural Affairs, Japan).
His main solo exhibitions so far include Defect in Vision (Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, 2012), Stories of a Beautiful Country (Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos [CAB], Burgos, Spain, 2012), and MAM Project 009: Meiro Koizumi (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2009), and more.
Furthermore, he has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Invisible Memories (Hara Art Museum, 2011), the Liverpool Biennale 2010, Media City Seoul 2010, and the Aichi Triennale (Japan, 2010), among others. In 2013, a solo exhibition is scheduled at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.