PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Tadasu Takamine (高嶺格)
b. 1968 in Kagoshima, Japan; based in Akita, Japan

Work in exhibition
The Bumps on the Earth, 2015
Motors, speakers, sodium vapor lamp, etc.
9 min. 2 sec.

See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157656801878686

Tadasu Takamine began performing with multimedia/performance collective Dumb Type while still a student at Kyoto City University of Arts, and took part in three performance pieces including S/N. Currently he works in diverse media such as installations incorporating video and audio, photography, video, sculpture, and self-directed performances in which he appears. For A Lover from Korea (2003), drawing inspiration from his relationship with an ethnic Korean resident of Japan, he took up residence in the Tamba Manganese Memorial, the site of a former mine where Koreans were forced to labor, while producing the work. For Kagoshima Esperanto (2005), he filled a space with soil and discarded objects and projected text in the dialect of Kagoshima and the international language Esperanto on to it. In Japan Syndrome – Berlin Version (2013), he transformed an area in front of Kyoto City Hall into a pulsating dance floor, with 1,000 viewers participating. These and other pieces blend incisive social critique with physicality and humor, with Takamine consistently investing his own physical presence and humanity’s flesh-and-blood nature in works that lay bare shared but unspoken taboos and our complicity in them. In September 2014, Takamine staged a new performance piece in Kyoto representing the final chapter in the Japan Syndrome project he launched in 2011. At Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, Takamine presents a multimedia installation with sound and lights in the basement of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

• Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art