HIROKO INOUE | Inside Out

Opening: Thu, 17.11.2011
Duration: 18.11.2011 – 10.12.2011
Curators: Berthold Ecker
Project concept: Sonja Gruber

“In the area around Fukushima, doctors are examining about 360,000 children and teenagers for the possible effects of the nuclear disaster. Radiation may have damaged their thyroid glands.” Die Zeit, 9.10.2011
“Please close your eyes and listen to the sound of your soul inside.”
With these words, the Japanese artist Hiroko Inoue invited teenagers to appear before her camera. And asked them the following questions: “What do you want? What path are you taking? Who do you want be?”
Questions that give voice to the dilemma of young people: chaos everywhere – outside, in the past and the future, as well as inside.
In her work, Inoue compels not only those portrayed but also the viewer to pause and reflect: inside the installation INSIDE OUT, the visitor views the inward looking teenagers from outside. The 17 life-size photographs, printed on transparencies and hanging from a steel ring seven metres in diameter, form a circle. Eyes shut, the young people surround the viewer, the walk-through sculpture offering him or her the opportunity to do the same: turn the gaze inwards, “to focus inwards and so on other levels of significance” (Inoue).
The photographs of the schoolchildren from Kobe and Vienna stand for the collective youth of the world. On her many travels, Inoue found herself continually confronted by the same questions. Whether underway in her homeland or staying in the remotest corner of Alaska, she encountered similar social problems that exacerbated her feeling of hopelessness and finally led to her increasingly taking up social issues in her art. Above all, however, the traumatic experience of the Kobe earthquake in 1995 was the starting-point of her long photographic confrontation with psychiatry: “I took photographs inside and outside psychiatric clinics. I wanted to draw attention to the desires, prayers and disappointments of the patients inside and, at the same time, to the same factors in us who find ourselves outside the building”. In the Otto Wagner Hospital, too, she documented the empty hospital rooms when, ten years after the Hanshin Awaji disaster, she was living in Vienna as a “special advisor for cultural exchange”. In an arrangement around the portraits of the young people, she uses light boxes to pose once again the question: “What is inside, what is outside? What is madness, what normality?” Questions which, in view of the history of the Steinhofgründe and the most recent catastrophes in Japan, we cannot escape.
“I believe we have come to a point at which we must reflect on the future, and urgently so: how in future we human beings could live together in nature and what seed we will leave for future generations.” (Hiroko Inoue in September 2011)



SHORT BIOGRAPHY
1974-1975 Studied textile art at the Okinawa Cultural Anthropology Institute | 1988 Special Prize for Sculpture at the Osaka Triennial, Prize of the City of Düsseldorf and Kansai Goethe-Institut | 2005 Special advisor of the Japanese government for cultural exchange in Vienna; first presentation of INSIDE OUT at the Jugendstiltheater, Otto Wagner Hospital, Vienna


A SELECTION OF EXHIBITIONS
1992 Seal the Time, Wacoal Ginza Art Space I, Tokyo (S) | 1997 Representation of Absence, Art Forum Yanaka, Tokyo (S) | 1999 Absence, Atelier am Eck, Düsseldorf/GER | 2000 An Earthquake and Art – being born from 17th January 1995, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe/JPN | 2003 What do thou want, Goethe-Institut, Tokyo, und C Square, Chukyo University, Nagoya/JPN (S), What wilt thou – Meditation, Museum Alte Post, Mülheim an der Ruhr/GER (S), Grosse Kunstausstellung, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf/GER | 2007 Chameleon Meadow – In Praise of Shadows, Clemson/USA (S) | 2008 Inside-Out, Hillside Forum, Tokyo (S) | 2011 Mori, Dortmunder Kunstverein und Inside-Out, Projektraum Fotografie, Dortmund/GER (S)