Fuyuka Shindo

 

Based in Sapporo, Japan, Fuyuka Shindo has been producing work based on her fieldwork as a way of confronting specific events in local as well as national history of Japan. In recent years, she has become interested in how history has been preserved, for example, in monuments, remains and ruins, as well as in archives and oral traditions. In her practice, she explores the ways in which audiences experience and witness artworks and events. In 2016, she was awarded an Asian Cultural Council grant to stay in New York and has participated in various art projects in Japan and internationally. Her work is currently shown as part of Roppongi Crossing 2022 (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo).

 

Thanks to:

Gillean Dickie, Honeysuckle Wood Trading Limited, Misako Kasahara, Dee Petersen, Nuraan Petersen, Valerie Price, The National Cycle Museum, Matt Webb, Yuki Miyake ……

​

​

I collect Bicycle parts for the same reasons I like these assembled handmade tools and objects 

 

During the residency at Troy House, Fuyuka Shindo explored an ongoing theme in her recent practice on memory and the legacy of the World War II from a present-day perspective. Her interest in this subject sprouted during her residency projects in Vietnam and Malaysia. During that time, she visited various war cemeteries, each of which commemorates civilians and/or soldiers from different communities or armies, including the Commonwealth war graves, and she became interested in the ways that the war dead are remembered differently. She learned that the Japanese army used bicycles as a means of transport and started collecting bicycle parts with locals by exchanging them and the stories behind them.

There are key elements in her current research: representation of war, remembering the war dead, cemeteries, gardens, and bicycles. Starting with these keywords, she continued her search in Wales, Scotland as well as in England. By visiting various places around the country, she came to witness the ways in which the history and the memories are kept and maintained around various sites in Britain.

 

‘I would like to present the chaotic state of the research and working process as an outcome of the residency.’ The exhibition presents a number of objects Fuyuka discovered on site in Wales, including the handmade ladder, stones, and bricks as well as the structures on which they are built. In this exhibition, with the map, viewers are invited to navigate through and set up their own connections with different works and objects.

​

​

 

 

Ryusuke Ito

 

Ryusuke Ito is a Japanese artist practicing video art, also a diehard experimental filmmaker still working with silver halide film.

 

His interests and curiosities focus on the materiality of moving images as a medium and its social function as a communication system. His series of video installations known as "Realistic Virtuality", he creates detailed miniature sets, which symbolize our modern life, such as a food court of a shopping mall, a flying drone and a ruin of a nuclear plant, and video-shoots them to live, and enlarges images of a miniature set trough projectors juxtapose them each other. Through eye-witnessing gaps between powerful, realistic images and its poor "original", his work is playful and amusing with sensing structures of video as a medium, as well as arousing suspicions of credibility of nowadays visual media, such as movies, TV and social networking services.

 

He is also known as a Japanese manga critic “Kenji Murasame” contributing to a magazine for various papers and magazines since the 1980s.

​

​

Techniques of Misunderstanding

​

Ryusuke Ito is a Japanese artist practicing video art, also a diehard experimental filmmaker still working with silver halide film.

 

Techniques of Misunderstanding presents a body of work created by Ryusuke Ito during his residency in Troy House. The exhibition will feature four installations composed of videos and mechanical materials, Ryusuke Ito focuses on measure, miniature and the possibilities brought by the digital techniques, unearthing the truth where sometimes we failed to see certain things on its surface. In video installation: dynamic installation with live video projection, the miniature camera moves slowly along the track in the miniature, the live images are transmitted to the projection synchronously, the installation juxtaposing the ‘truth’ and the ‘illusion’ as such can be traced back to Ryusuke Ito’s series of video installation known as ‘Realistic Virtuality’. The artist ‘imprisoned’ the videos of cattles and chickens into a large and a small cage respectively, this video installation plays with the contradiction lying in the scale of the entity and the reimagined. Another installation on display features a long tortuous ruler with its partial view being framed in a miniature screen, where a crawling model snail is also placed on the ruler. The fourth installation represents an old chair covered with a blanket where an English vintage fire-pit is placed at the bottom, a miniature screen displaying the current news about wars is subtly positioned in the fire-pit.

 

The installations filled with inherent contradiction yet not losing its amusement, reflect the artist’s conscious deliberation in daily objects and the entangled relationship between people and images or videos manipulating each other.

​

​

​

 

Acknowledgment

 

This residency and exhibition have been made possible with generous support from The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and in partnership with NPO S-AIR, Japan. We would like to thank the artists, Fuyuka Shindo and Ryusuke Ito.

 

With thanks to: 

Butetown Artists (Richard Cox, David Gould, Maggie James, Casper White), Delfina Foundation, Gillean Dickie, Honeysuckle Wood Trading Limited, Misako Kasahara, Yuki Miyake, Dee Petersen, Nuraan Petersen, Valerie Price, The National Cycle Museum, and Matt Webb

​

​

 

 

Opening