Noritoshi Hirakawa "Lei Lenka"
Tilton Gallery
This event has ended.
Tilton Gallery presents Lei Lenka, a dance performance with video and photography by Japanese artist Noritoshi Hirakawa.
Noritoshi Hirakawa creates performances, photography and films that explore the hidden social structures and desires that often go unrecognized or are sublimated and that he perceives as essential to what it means to be human. He exposes the unspoken, private moments of human interaction that we as a society repress, thereby liberating what remains fantasy for most people.
As choreographer of an action or performance, Hirakawa is himself spectator, although there is an implicit interaction between the artist and the performers. We, the audience, also become complicit in the action, the liberation, as it were, of the private moment in the public eye.
For Hirakawa, photography and film act as “a recording device or proof of action” and a means by which the spectator becomes a participant in the psychological drama he creates. Photography allows for the mental re-configuration of an image, merging imagination with specificity, the private with the public.
Recent work has explored the boundaries of perception through dance, both filmed and in performance. For two weeks Lei Lenka, the video of a choreographed dance performance, will be exhibited. For two hours daily, the dancers will perform in the space alongside this film, accompanied by the live musician.
Hirakawa explains that “In Japanese lei means spirit and lenka means the poetic link between humans. I want to express this link between people, by the innocence and aesthetic value expressed in the movement within ‘real life’ by people in the city of New York. This lifts people out of the limitations of social and private importance. It is a dance we all do everyday and it holds poignant aesthetic, poetic and sensual meaning - whatever we do. In this work, the mundane with Will becomes spiritual as shown in Quantum Physics. A ‘meaningless’ gesture or posture holds endless meaning; captured by film and performance it is offered to the viewer for interpretation.”
Noritoshi Hirakawa was born in Fukuoka, Japan in 1960 and has lived and worked in New York since the mid-nineties. He has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries internationally and his work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, among many others.
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Schedule
from February 14, 2012 to February 25, 2012
Daily performances will be 2 – 4 pm, Tuesday through Saturdays.
Opening Reception on 2012-02-14 from 18:00 to 20:00