Images courtesy of Ikuru Kuwajima
The Japanese artist, photographer, and writer Ikuru Kuwajima will take part in the artists’ residence of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial. At the meeting on May 20th at 7 PM (Moscow time), he will talk about his project related to Nizhny Tagil. Pre-registration is required to participate.
Ikuru Kuwajima lives in Russia and explores the stories of emigrants from Europe to Asia who migrated in the 1920s and 1940s. At the residence, he will continue to work on this topic. The new focus of the project will be Viktor Starukhin, the legendary Japanese baseball player of the mid-20th century, who was born in Nizhny Tagil. In Japan, everyone still knows him, the 25,000th stadium is named after him, but in his hometown they have never even heard of him. In the conversation, Ikuru will share a short story about how Starukhin ended up in Japan, and about the wave of white emigration to the East. In addition, he will talk about his past projects: the journey from the shores of the Baltic Sea to the coast of Japan following the footsteps of the German avant-garde architect Bruno Taut, about a project about people repressed and deported to the Krasnoyarsk Territory from different regions of the USSR, and about a study of snags carried away by the ocean from the mouth of the Yenisei and thrown to the shores of Iceland. These three projects are thematically and historically interconnected; they reveal the stories of European exiles in not the most obvious places in the world, their fates and influence in local and global contexts.
The Ural Industrial Biennial is the largest international project in the field of contemporary art in Russia, this year its theme was a modified quote from Ecclesiastes: “A Time to Embrace and to Refrain from Embracing.” The program of art residences of the 6th Biennial covers nine cities of the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions, every month the organizers will introduce one of the artists of the program.
Read more on the website.
