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until 26.10. | #4432ARTatBerlin | Dorothée Nilsson Gallery shows from Wednesday, 11. September 2024 (Opening: 10.09.) the exhibition TESTIMONY TO A FALL by the arrtist Yuken Teruya.
There is a saying by Du Fu: “A country may fall, but its mountains and rivers remain.” After Japan’s defeat in World War II, many Japanese spoke this verse and quoted it often. However, the verse does not apply to Okinawa, where a total of 200,000 tons of bombs exploded during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, including bombs dropped from planes and shelling on the ground. The colors of Okinawa’s landscape, the natural colors of greenery and the red tiles of homes, have mostly turned gray. Even in villages that had never seen the sea, the iron storms were a reminder of the threat of the sea that lay far beyond the mountains. The artillery fire of the US battleships filled Okinawa’s offshore landscape with blackness. In the battle for Okinawa, where the inhabitants were “a sacrificed stone” before the decisive battle on the mainland, one in four inhabitants perished. The bombs that actually cause death, injury and destruction are pieces of iron that go off in storms. The exploding weapons no longer have the shape of rockets or cannons, but look more like crushed ore. The countless shards of iron after the destruction have long since become part of Okinawa’s landscape. They still lurk silently in the fields and bushes of the battlefields. It is as if they are in denial about their past deeds. The work series To the Sky exposes the bomb fragments that are still waiting to be picked up by balloons and forgotten.
The same landscape of rubble extends to Ukraine, Palestine and the battlefields of the present. A piece of iron buried in nature is still the product of someone. Is it possible to make the identity and responsibility of the manufacturer disappear naturally? Even after the explosion, the weapons remain as fragments on the ground. They have not only destroyed the lives or destruction of people, but also permanently changed the terrain and the environment. The manufacturer must be held responsible for salvaging the weapons after their manufacture and for compensation for contamination and damage.
The Bingata Keshi Wind represents a clear and liberated sky over Okinawa. Balloons are not allowed to fly near US Marine Corps military airfields in Japan that are located in densely populated areas, including the Bunkyo district of Ginowan City. The reason for this is that they are under the “jurisdiction” of the US military and do not have air sovereignty. In this work, balloons are decorated with bingata patterns, which are used as dance costumes in classical Okinawan dance. Through the traditional patterns of irises, weeping cherry blossoms and auspicious clouds, the balloons rise freely into the open sky.
The Monopoly series is a symbol of money itself, of toy money (Monopoly money). It is an attempt to remeasure the power of symbols in culture, nation and religion in order to visualize values that cannot be measured. The works are based on the themes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Le Bourg Museum or the British flag.
Yuken Teruya (1973, Japan) is an artist living in Berlin and New York. Teruya received his BFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo in 1996 and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001, where he has spent 20 years of his life. His works have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2013), and are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim, New York, the Flag Art Foundation, New York, the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the Charles Saatchi Collection, London, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, and the Daimler Collection, Stuttgart, among others.
Vernissage: Tuesday, 10. September 2024, 6-9 p.m.
Exhibition period: Wednesday, 11. September to Saturday, 26. October 2024
To the gallery
Image caption title: Yuken Teruya, “To the Sky”, 2022
Exhibition Yuken Teruya – Dorothée Nilsson Gallery | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
