• Koki Tanaka / Pernod Ricard Fellowship 2017
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    Koki Tanaka / Pernod Ricard Fellowship 2017

    In residency in March, September and October 2017

    Artist Koki Tanaka (1975, Tochigi, Japan) lives and works in Kyoto, where he grad­u­ated from the Tokyo Zokei University. His ver­sa­tile art prac­tice includes video, pho­tog­raphy, site-specific instal­la­tion and inter­ven­tional pro­jects. Koki Tanaka visu­al­izes and reveals the mul­tiple con­texts latent in the most simple everyday acts. His recent pro­jects doc­u­ment behav­iors that people uncon­sciously exhibit once con­fronted to unusual sit­u­a­tions, such as being given a haircut by nine stylists or hearing a same piano played by five pianists simul­ta­ne­ously. Koki Tanaka intends to reverse the per­cep­tion of the things we tend to over­look in everyday life.

    Koki Tanaka has shown widely in inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions such as the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), VanAbbe Museum (Eindhoven), the ICA (London), the Taipei Biennial 2006 (Taipei), the Gwangju Biennial 2008 (Gwangju), the Liverpool Biennal 2016 (Liverpool), the Japan pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. He received a spe­cial men­tion for his national par­tic­i­pa­tion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, and the 2015 Deutsche bank artist of the year award.

    Workshop #1 « 1946–52 Occupation Era, and 1970 Between Man and Matter », December 6 – 7, 2014, Action, workshop, and video documentation, Courtesy of the artist

    STATEMENT OF INTENT

    “My friend — a Brazilian artist based in Paris — brought me to a restau­rant in Belleville some time ago. We ate cas­soulet. It was French cuisine but the owner was a Japanese lady. I was somehow inter­ested in how she ended up there. While we chatted, she showed me an old black-and-white pho­tograph of the place. She said it was taken in the 1940s. The place used to be like a gen­eral store. As you know, Paris was occu­pied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. My friend men­tioned this place might have been one of the spot where the Resistance gath­ered back then. Or it might even have been a place where Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors got together. But a resis­tance group was based in Belleville and they had an under­ground print work­shop nearby the restau­rant, so it could really be that.

    The story ends here. No more infor­ma­tion. However I’m curious about the ambi­guity and the open-end of this short story. I went to eat cas­soulet cooked by a Japanese chef, and even­tu­ally encoun­tered History. Past is in the pre­sent."