Our normal life has changed suddenly with a pandemic.
Why am I afraid of the virus?
Is it because of the fear of dying?
Or am I afraid of the uncertain future?
Time goes by every day regardless of my confusion.
When I locked myself in the house, I no longer knew what day it was.
I felt the time because I saw the plants were growing in the garden.
I felt the time because the flowers bloomed and died.
Nature never stops.
So, to feel the time, I recorded my drawings on the changing plants.
This is the series of “living day after day”.
The work : “living day after day, flourishing time - chia seeds”, I ‘visualised the time that the seeds germinated and grew up.
Video:
‘withering time – leaf’
time that the leaf was dying.
Photos:
‘propagating time - piñanona fruit’
time that the fruit dried up, and was eaten by some animals.
The “now” of our life is between the time of birth and death. In the meantime, we go ahead without turning back.
I live day after day.
THE SEED SOWER is a Self-portraits project series that documents our relationship in the simplest form of Seed Sowing through the process of giving life to Seed from germination into plant in the simplest term possible in time of isolation in responses to the covid-19 pandemic as the whole world shutdown and went into isolation to stop the spread of covid-19 virus. I took up this project to documents my time in isolation in Lagos, Nigeria, to keep myself occupied and alive. I turn a part of my living room into a studio to photograph myself, everyday I dressed up in different clothing and sit in the same position holding a pot buried with bean seeds. I nurtured, waited and watched it grow into a plant while taking pictures of myself everyday for 30 days. Beans sowing is one of the fast growing plants also being part of the staple food chain in Nigeria and in the world. The pot add as a virtue which is delicate but yet add to the aesthetic value in carrying of the rapid success of plant sowing.
When I hear something, watch, look, daydream, mind wander, and walk, I always see words or listen to them internally. When I grew up, I thought this is merely an auditory hallucination, and I have to deal with it through meditation or mindfulness practice until I learned later how useful this could be to my artistic research in art & language and decided to include it in my artistic practice. One of the different techniques I use in writing in art is the Ticker Tape Synaesthesia*, where words are floating into my mind’s eye. Sometimes I don’t know the final text and let it comes from the forms, shapes, numbers, conditions, or the generated words come from what I hear in the surrounding, as my mind creates a subtitle for everything he hears even the most abstract thing like noise. Ticker Taping for me is a second language decoding the surrounding and translating the life I am living in the moment, a sound of an inner voice living within, and I learned to listen carefully to it. In “Transcription of a Shadow”; a series of 30 videos to be screened daily form what I see in random spread letters and how my brain pick and construct words out of them where the work gets into a final text at the end of the month. The audience is invited to watch daily for a month “Hidden_Message” ** of this project while collecting the thirty fragments of the text to be revealed. Nisrine Boukhari *Tickertape experience is the subjective phenomenon of routinely visualising the orthographic appearance of words that one hears, speaks, or thinks, like mental subtitles in the mind's eye. Synesthesia (n.) - a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in another; Experienced as a "blending" of the senses. ** Hidden_Messages is an international art project curated by Rainer Junghanns from Raum Fuer Raum in Düsseldorf/ Germany.
Frottage Drawings on Japanese paper 16th of March until 14th of April 2020 Since the 16th of March I made a daily frottage drawing. I found all materials for my drawings during my morning walks or in the studio.
Dec. 2020 Second lockdown in Germany Blattwerk / Paper cutout a Christmas Special for RAUM _ fuer _RAUM
RAUM_fuer_RAUM: Did your work develop on your way to the studio? Yukako Ando: All images developed on the way to my ‚permitted essential job‘. The official government order was: On March 19, 2020, an Executive Order and Public Health Order by the State of California directed all Californians to stay home except to go to an essential job or to shop for essential needs. The situation: On May 4, 2020 an Executive Order by the State of California informed local health jurisdictions and industry sectors that they may gradually reopen under new modifications and guidance provided by the state per Public Health Order on May 7, 2020. So basically, I wasn’t allowed to work in my studio. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to leave the house and drive there. RAUM_fuer_RAUM: Did you work on any projects during the lockdown? Yukako Ando: I was working on ‚lattice works‘ in my studio. Due to the request to participate in the HIDDEN project, I became more involved with the current time and surrounding situation. Every day, on my way to work, I collected pictures taken by my driving recorder. During the drive I tried to figure out what I could do with these images. At that time, most of the people stayed at home. Only some, including myself, had to drive through the city. I drove 80 km per day. It was a ‚work in progress‘ project which resulted in thousands of collected images. I took them to reconstruct my daily roundtrip drive. I was able drive twice as fast driving through LA – There are no images on the weekends and holidays, because I didn’t drive then. This work documents a total of 31 days. There were many occurences during this time including stores reopening, Curfews, Riots, Looting, National Guard intervention, peaceful demonstration in Los Angeles to commemorate George Floyd, an African - American man killed during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, 2020.
Corona19 Pandemic made it possible to experience the similarity of human emotions by exchanging events around the world and emotions that people experience in real time via SNS. When economic activities and human movements stop, nature and atmosphere begin to survive. The vertical evolution of technology and the convenience of everyday life that have been achieved while the order of nature has been destroyed make the earth, including humans, a ruin. Paradoxically, mankind is in time and space to think about the direction of human evolution and development after the pandemic.
04.05.2020 HIDDEN _ Messages Inviting the Chile artist Maximo Corvalan Pinchera to participate in the HIDDEN _ Messages 20.05.2020 Rough wall drawing „Drawing the World“ drawing of a fictional worldmap on a wall in the exhibition space RAUM _ fuer _ RAUM, Duesseldorf marking all places of the artists being invited to participate. 21.05.2020 Return invitation of Maximo Corvalan Pinchera to Rainer Junghanns to participate in a global Artwork : He sent a worldmap ‘Mapamundiʼ to each artist to create their artistic intervention. 25.5.2020 Rainer Junghanns blended his fictional sketch of the world in the worldmap, sent from Chile. Drawing the world / Mapamundi ...
On Tuesday 17th of march I arrived in a small village at the hills surrounding Cannes, France to set up an Art_Space_Project located on a private property of an investors family. One day later, at 11.30h, we managed to unload all necessary components arriving from Germany. At 12:00h the French lockdown started. No one was allowed to leave the house. Food supply from the village was only advised with a mask, (glasses or sunglasses) and disposable gloves. Then conditions got worse: Leaving the property only for 1 hour within a 1 km radius and only with a daily printed allowance by the French ministry of internal affairs. Once, I got in a security check by the local police. I ended up being held for several hours at the village square next to the property, as my ministry allowance was only digital on my phone and not printed out properly. Every day during this time, I had close contact with my daughter, living in cologne. For her, being pregnant and working as a doctor in Düsseldorf it was at that time unbelievable that the situation in Germany will reach this severe stadium of Lockdown, facemasks and contact ban. Every morning and sometimes in the evening I sent her two photos:
Ok so here is my latest work, FRAGILE. Well it’s a trailer. This is how I felt in the beginning of Corona. It was like walking on eggshells or walking on glass. Not being able to move freely, not being able to throw your arms around a friend for a hug etc. For me it affected my movement and everyone’s movements around me, we became awkward. And some people managed to thrive in this time, some people just about survived and some just didn’t make it at all…
Marguerite Donlon, a native of Ireland, is an innovative, contemporary choreographer and director based in Berlin and Hagen. From 2021 she will be the new Dance Director at Theatre Osnabrück. Currently she is the ballet director and choreographer of Ballet Hagen at Theater Hagen. Known for her humour and profound creativity, her work thrills an unusually broad audience. With stylistic innovation, Irish wit and the combination of different art forms, Marguerite Donlon has pushed artistic limits to secure a place in the international dance scene.
http://donlon.de
The guest post is also a transformation into an expanded project 'nomansland.academy' made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia
RAUM_fuer_RAUM in collaboration with AllArtNow
HIDDEN _ Messages Opening on Friday, May 21, 2021
https://www.kunstforum.de/nachrichten/hidden-messages-in-stockholm/
instagram.com/allartnow_organisation/facebook.com/AllArtNowOrganisation
raumfuerraum.netfacebook.com/raumfuerraumfacebook.com/rainer.junghanns
HIDDEN _ Messages goes MexicoProject Partner: HASHI GALLERY in collabaration with GALERÍA CENZONTLE
Opening on Thursday, February 2nd, 2022 6.30 p.m.
https://hashi.mx in cooperation
https://www.instagram.com/galeriacenzontle/?hl=de
from the project with a solo exhibition in RAUM_fuer_RAUM:
raumfuerraum.netfacebook.com/raumfuerraum
HIDDEN _ Messages goes SeoulProject Partner: IPO Alternative ArtspaceOpening on October 14th, 2022
HIDDEN_PLACES_4_HIDDEN_Messages is also a transformation into an expanded project 'nomansland.academy' made possible by a grant form the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia
Project: Mapping Porous Borders/ Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!
Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago (MAC) from 2 August 2022 to 1 October 2022.
The show will open on August 2.