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Elena Knox "Azarashi Banashi"
Anomaly
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Elena Knox
Anomaly is pleased to announce a forthcoming solo exhibition by Elena Knox at our gallery. Titled "azarashi banashi," the exhibition will be open from June 3 to June 24, 2023.
Elena Knox (1975, Australia) is a versatile artist who applies varied modes of expression, including digital media, performance, sculpture, music, and installations. Delving into issues under the surface of human society, she stages them in works of art with lacings of both humor and irony.
To date, her showings in Japan include Pathetic Fallacy, a video about aging and mortality featuring dramatic performances by an elderly woman and a humanoid robot, which was presented at Future and the Arts: AI, Robots, Cities, Life – How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow at Mori Art Museum in 2019. She presented a participatory project Volcana Brainstorm (making pornography for shrimp), at Yokohama Triennale 2020 and an interactive installation, The Masters in the ICC Annual 2022 Life/Likeness, at NTT Intercommunication Center Tokyo, where viewers could watch a love triangle evolve between an A.I. chatbot, a holographic virtual assistant, and Knox herself.
For this solo exhibition, her first at Anomaly, Knox is reconstructing Protective Seal, a seven-channel video installation made with the companion robot Paro (*1). This work was premièred last year at Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2022.
In creating Protective Seal, Knox made a long journey from Tokyo to the Arctic Circle together with Paro, an A.I. robot in the form of a harp seal pup that was developed to soothe the human soul. Since the onset of industrialization, Earth’s atmosphere has suffered depletion, and global warming is now steadily worsening. As a result, real Arctic seals are being burned by ultraviolet radiation while areas of their habitat shrink due to ice melt. What are the “thoughts” of the robot seal when confronted with this situation? And how should we, who view this changing world through the adventurers PARO and Knox, feel about it and act?
Fusing science, storytelling, contact with locals, and climate data, Protective Seal finds a human–environment–machine link and a medium for the theorization of sentient phenomena in the A.I. sensory robot PARO.
As exemplified by this piece, Knox produces works that proactively investigate tough societal issues. The hallmark of her artistic output is her attempt to dismantle the very structure of an imbalanced condition, expose its distortions, and consequently implant an aversion to it in the minds of viewers, who had taken it for granted and are left with complicated feelings as a result. In addressing gender issues, for example, she accepts the task of dissecting the symbols assigned to women by society instead of turning to sloganeering/symbolization as regards female empowerment or opposition to discrimination. The target systems were made by human beings but can no longer be controlled by us. Through her works, while making extensive use of robots and other technologies that are likewise made by human beings, Knox attempts to unravel these systems.
This exhibition will also present, for the first time in Japan, Chinoiserie (ode to Wuhan) (2019). This is a video performance work shot in a derelict hotel pool in the Chinese city of Wuhan, thought to be where Covid-19 first appeared. It captures the chaotic state of society in Wuhan, a scene of fast-paced economic development and a mixture of the old and new. As the video unfolds, we can hear beeping horns and traffic noise as people go about their daily lives outside the building. Seen in conjunction with the footage of the unoccupied yet impacted Arctic tundra in Protective Seal, it conveys a sense of the futility of human actions in the name of “development.”
Today, entrenched systems are coming apart at the seams, and conventional outlooks on values are being shaken. In this context, we urge you to experience the world of Elena Knox, whose works have a multifaceted, open perspective intricately balanced upon subsurface conceptual layers.
(*1) Paro is developed by Professor Takanori Shibata at The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST Japan). A “mental commitment robot,” it was named World’s Most Therapeutic Robot by Guinness World Records.
Elena Knox (1975, Australia) is a versatile artist who applies varied modes of expression, including digital media, performance, sculpture, music, and installations. Delving into issues under the surface of human society, she stages them in works of art with lacings of both humor and irony.
To date, her showings in Japan include Pathetic Fallacy, a video about aging and mortality featuring dramatic performances by an elderly woman and a humanoid robot, which was presented at Future and the Arts: AI, Robots, Cities, Life – How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow at Mori Art Museum in 2019. She presented a participatory project Volcana Brainstorm (making pornography for shrimp), at Yokohama Triennale 2020 and an interactive installation, The Masters in the ICC Annual 2022 Life/Likeness, at NTT Intercommunication Center Tokyo, where viewers could watch a love triangle evolve between an A.I. chatbot, a holographic virtual assistant, and Knox herself.
For this solo exhibition, her first at Anomaly, Knox is reconstructing Protective Seal, a seven-channel video installation made with the companion robot Paro (*1). This work was premièred last year at Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2022.
In creating Protective Seal, Knox made a long journey from Tokyo to the Arctic Circle together with Paro, an A.I. robot in the form of a harp seal pup that was developed to soothe the human soul. Since the onset of industrialization, Earth’s atmosphere has suffered depletion, and global warming is now steadily worsening. As a result, real Arctic seals are being burned by ultraviolet radiation while areas of their habitat shrink due to ice melt. What are the “thoughts” of the robot seal when confronted with this situation? And how should we, who view this changing world through the adventurers PARO and Knox, feel about it and act?
Fusing science, storytelling, contact with locals, and climate data, Protective Seal finds a human–environment–machine link and a medium for the theorization of sentient phenomena in the A.I. sensory robot PARO.
As exemplified by this piece, Knox produces works that proactively investigate tough societal issues. The hallmark of her artistic output is her attempt to dismantle the very structure of an imbalanced condition, expose its distortions, and consequently implant an aversion to it in the minds of viewers, who had taken it for granted and are left with complicated feelings as a result. In addressing gender issues, for example, she accepts the task of dissecting the symbols assigned to women by society instead of turning to sloganeering/symbolization as regards female empowerment or opposition to discrimination. The target systems were made by human beings but can no longer be controlled by us. Through her works, while making extensive use of robots and other technologies that are likewise made by human beings, Knox attempts to unravel these systems.
This exhibition will also present, for the first time in Japan, Chinoiserie (ode to Wuhan) (2019). This is a video performance work shot in a derelict hotel pool in the Chinese city of Wuhan, thought to be where Covid-19 first appeared. It captures the chaotic state of society in Wuhan, a scene of fast-paced economic development and a mixture of the old and new. As the video unfolds, we can hear beeping horns and traffic noise as people go about their daily lives outside the building. Seen in conjunction with the footage of the unoccupied yet impacted Arctic tundra in Protective Seal, it conveys a sense of the futility of human actions in the name of “development.”
Today, entrenched systems are coming apart at the seams, and conventional outlooks on values are being shaken. In this context, we urge you to experience the world of Elena Knox, whose works have a multifaceted, open perspective intricately balanced upon subsurface conceptual layers.
(*1) Paro is developed by Professor Takanori Shibata at The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST Japan). A “mental commitment robot,” it was named World’s Most Therapeutic Robot by Guinness World Records.
Schedule | Jun 3 (Sat) 2023-Jun 24 (Sat) 2023 Opening Hours Information
Opening Reception Jun 3 (Sat) 2023 17:00 - 19:00 | ||||
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | http://anomalytokyo.com/en/exhibition/elena_knox_azarashi_banashi/ | ||||
| Venue | Anomaly http://anomalytokyo.com/en/top/ | ||||
| Location | 4F Terrada Art Complex, 1-33-10 Higashi Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 140-0002 | ||||
| Access | 9 minute walk from exit B at Tennozu Isle Station on the Rinkai line, 10 minute walk from the South exit of Tennozu Isle Station on the Tokyo Monorail line, 9 minute walk from the North exit of Shimbamba Station on the Keikyu line. | ||||
| Phone | 03-6433-2988 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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