In Granddaughters, the artist's most recent series,
Miwa Yanagi develops her space/image syntheses further. In contrast to
Elevator Girls, however, in which she continues to investigate the
inability to communicate by creating an autonomous, anonymous, and
unsettling counter-world, both My Grandmothers and Granddaughters
pursue the exact opposite. Faced with a desire to flee urban anonymity,
Yanagi states: "I am wandering about those frozen cities: one cannot
connect with the women at information counters. They are ephemeral, like
the light on a subway platform which we see only when the train
approaches." The individual enters the stage; now, it's about
communication in every form: dialogues, interviews, personal reports,
written text, visual and digital media. Yanagi's works elegantly combine
every means the information society has at its disposal, exploring the
spatial concept further and augmenting it with a temporal dimension.
Miwa Yanagi: My Grandmothers, Miwa, 2001, Deutsche Bank Collection, ©
Miwa Yanagi
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In a complex superimposition of the real and the imaginary,
Yanagi's spatial syntheses can be read as "architectures of the soul."
Following the future-oriented perspective of My Grandmothers,
Granddaughters now directs its gaze into the past. In the artist's
first video installation, grandmothers talk about their own grandmothers.
Their voices, however, are replaced by that of young girls dubbed over in
yet another utilization of visual codes familiar to us: citing the sterile
aesthetics of television images and posing before various city panoramas,
the grandmothers on the screens resemble newscasters. Here, too, reality
and fantasy merge in a dream world composed of the impenetrable psyche of
the modern subject. "For these old ladies, some of the stories they told
me are really just that, stories or fantasies. Their grandmothers died a
long time ago, and now they talk mostly about the good things, not the bad
things."
Miwa Yanagi: Granddaughters, 2003,
installation view, exhibition Lille 2004
In
Miwa Yanagi's rooms, the "right" and the "true" lose their validity as
reality is rendered relative. The criterion of the "beautiful," like an
echo of Vilem Flusser's concept of a changed reality, appears to take
their place: "Out of a reality blown apart, into mere foam, the goddess of
beauty emerges."
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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