Exhibition Period: 31 July (Friday) – 12 October (Monday), 2015
Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00 (Last entry 19:30),
Sun 11:00-19:00 (Last entry 18:30)
Open daily except 18 September, Free admission
Venue: Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum
（8F, 5-4-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan TEL: 03-3569-3300）
Organized by: Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Special Support: Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (HIS),
The University of Tokyo
Equipment provided by Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc.
Le Forum is pleased to announce the hosting of “Demarcation”, an exhibition by Akira Takayama and Meiro Koizumi, specially curated by guest curator Fumihiko Sumitomo. The two featured artists, each renowned for confronting contemporary society through their own unique perspectives, will showcase new creations steeped in expressions aimed at probing the demarcations in the links between ourselves and others, between the past and the present, and other dimensional differentiations.
In this exhibition, Sumitomo oversees efforts to define the potential of new forms of art today――an era characterized by ever-increasing sensations of conflict and apprehension towards the concentration, controls and other aspects inherently applied by “modern rationalism”.
Stage director Takayama is known for his experimental works to break down the relationships between the stage and the seating, and between the performers and the audience that comprise the conventional approach to theatre. This time, he unveils a virtual landscape, christened “Happy Island: The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous”, is played out in dynamic terms within Le Forum space.
Koizumi, for his part, has pursued the creation of works through performance and video since the 2000’s. For this exhibition, he has crafted a video work through which portrays the mechanism of the human memory, which is largely hidden to the naked eye. The question is posed of whether memory is an entity that we ourselves harbor, or in essence defined through other people and things? Koizumi harnesses his distinctive style to shed light upon the demarcations flickering between conscious and subconscious, calm and confusion, ourselves and others.
Guest curator Sumitomo offers the following assessment of the exhibition: “Takayama and Koizumi are artists driven by no-nonsense commitments to coming to grips with contemporary society on their own inimitable terms of expression. While their domains differ, they share in common the stance of mobilizing chosen subject matter to flesh out the primordial issues faced by the human race. In this exhibition, their respective works may naturally be viewed as separate creations. Yet at the same time, they likewise lend themselves to the perception of mutually complementary proposals running in a single vein. Ultimately, their creations prompt the query of how we human beings, who fancy ourselves at the centre of the universe as we define it, have grown so detached from nature and other people? For that matter, we must ask if it will ever be possible to redefine and restore those ties going forward.”
“The world began without man and it will end without him.”
—From the final chapter of Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss