"The BAR vol. 2: Donna Ong and Thiago Rocha Pitta" Exhibition

SCAI X SCAI

Finished

Artists

Donna Ong, Thiago Rocha Pitta

The experience of artists in residence must invariably be complex and contradictory. Arriving for the first time in a city like Tokyo from Brazil or Singapore, the artist is confronted with a rootless situation, where he or she must find multiple relations in order to place oneself. Things are not familiar. Language, the codes which underlie everything, is beyond their immediate reach. How can an artist operate in such a condition? What anchors them down? It seems to me that the predicament of an artist in residence program is actually not so very different to the situation which the French Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant referred to as a 'poetics of relation', in his study of the postcolonial experiences of French Caribbean cultures. A 'poetics of relation' speaks about an experience of multiplicity without fixed totalizing roots. Glissant understands identity as something developed out of relations and not in isolation. It is this perspective of ceaseless relation-making which the artist discovers in an unknown place (between people, places, one's own understandings) and the occasional slippages which happen that characterizes the journeying artist. Donna Ong and Thiago Rocha Pitta's new works made during their stays in Tokyo have hopefully manifested this sense of errantry (wandering, straying).

Since 2007 the Backers Foundation, a private group of patrons from the business worlds, has supported two emerging contemporary artists and one curator to come to Tokyo and stay for a three month residency. The non profit organisation AIT works with the Backers Foundation to organize and host the artists in Japan.

Opening reception: June 13th (Fri) 18:30 - 20:30

[Image: Donna Ong, "The Meeting", video, 2008]

Schedule

Jun 14 (Sat) 2008-Jun 29 (Sun) 2008