13th Art Division Excellence Award
SEKILALA
Video work [Japan]
SHIMURA Yuka / SHIMURA Kentaro (SHIMURABROS.)
Outline
This is a story of a family in a setting that almost seems like to exist in one world. However, these dissociated worlds are connected by sophisticated virtual reality technologies. Feeling alienated from life and suppressing his feeling of life, the father encounters ‘bio-furniture’, pieces of living furniture equipped with system engineering. An open story developed on three screens continues to weave other new stories.
Reason for Award
This is an installation work that uses triple projections and shows the (dis)communication in a family through a virtual-reality space. Stories related to bio-furniture with a mouse embedded in it appear on the screens, but each time in different spatial and temporal configurations as a random combination of a fragmented sequence. Whose reality, memory, and obsession is it, and how far does it go? The viewer weaves each understanding as an existence that moves freely around different virtual spaces of time, people, and stories. The visual image, rendered brilliantly with a distinctive sense of atmosphere, looks ordinary at first glance, but perhaps, this is intentional. The contrast between the quality of the image as its content and the structure of system and space as a meta frame is vibrant, and, in this sense, it qualifies this work as being materialized in an extremely scrupulous way. The artists’ inquisitive mind and critical eye for the grammar of image and the mechanism of the image medium are constantly felt.