Bodyscapes: New Film & Video from Japan

Screened at Phoenix in January 2019, Bodyscapes is a collection of films by Japanese artists whose use of the body is central to their work – either as a landscape, a political metaphor or method of expression – the body acts as a vehicle and subject to communicate ideas.

In Fuyuhiko Takata’s Little Mermaid-inspired Cambrian Explosion, Takata’s character – Princess Mermaid – attempts to create his own legs by bloodily sawing his tail in half. Aya Momose attempts to speak and converse with a goat, to share feelings of forgiveness and pain following the commitment from one body to another in her film, To Cuddle a Goat, a Poor Grammar Exercise. And in The Educational System of an Empire by Hikaru Fujii, the artist asks a group of young South Korean’s to reenact the tyrannical actions of colonial Japan upon the nation of Korea.

Programme

– Bivalvia: Act I​, Yu Araki, 2017, 20:20mins
– Cambrian Explosion​, Fuyuhiko Takata, 2016, 2:35mins
– To Cuddle a Goat, a Poor Grammar Exercise​, Aya Momose, 2016, 13:50mins
– The Educational System of an Empire​​, Hikaru Fujii, 2016, 21 mins ​​
– Daytime, Yuichiro Tamura, 2017, 2:50 mins

Total runtime: 61 mins. Suitable for 18+. Bodyscapes was curated by Moritz Cheung, Videoclub’s curator, and is supported by Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and Arts Council England.