Unattained Landscape	April, 2013 No. 888

Press Release
June 1 – October 20, 201311h – 18h Wed – SunPreview
May 29 – 31, 2013
Timed to coincide with the Venice Biennale’s 55th International Art Exhibition,
The Japan Foundation will present a special exhibition titled Unattained Landscapein conjunction with the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. Focusing on the themeof identity in Japanese culture, the event will consist of works by both Japanese andforeign artists representing a wide range of genres, including contemporary art,
graphic design, literature, film, sound and manga. In organizing this exhibition, TheJapan Foundation aims to foster greater global understanding, transmit information
about Japanese culture and contribute to international cultural activities.
Organizers
The Japan FoundationFondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
In Cooperation withCenter for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu
Supported byNEC Display Solutions Ltd., Kikkoman Corporation, JFC Deutschland GmbH,
Kagoshima Prefecture, Kagoshima Sake and Shochu Makers Association
Unattained Landscape is an exhibition that promotes art and cultural exchanges
held within The Japan Foundation to ultimately reflect contemporary creation
by reconsidering and questioning the islands of Japan as potential models forcontemporary culture. How can this vast and dispersed land be home to acommon culture? How might it invoke common sensations in those who visit?
How does this inform judgment on communities, however scattered andfragmented, on a global scale?
Unattained Landscape challenges the archipelago – the land in its contemporary
form, and whatever it means to belong to a community, including the conditionsof formation and its relation to a territory. As nations are perpetually madeor unmade, and as they subsequently mark territories with new physical boundaries,
mental and temporal maps imperceptibly emerge to create invisible, discontinuous
territories that transcend notions of a ‘nation’. These maps reveal an imaginary
version of Japan; they convey desires and paradigms of a country represented
not only by a group of cities, poetry, games or food, but by a fusion of fantasies
invoked and inspired by Japanese and non-Japanese minds and films.
Artists invited to take part in the exhibition will contribute to opening new insights
in an attempt to answer these questions.

The exhibition will feature the work of Japanese and international artists frommultiple creative fields: visual art, graphic design, cartoon, literature, performance,sound and film. Ultimately, Unattained Landscape proposes an overlapping of skills,attitudes and disciplines that promotes a way beyond the repetitive format of
traditional contemporary art exhibitions. This renewed curatorial approach functions
as the best way of describing the hectic changes within Japanese identity, and it is a
microcosm that illustrates worldwide changes in how global communities choose
to conceive, represent and live life.

Participants
Meiro Koizumi
Simon Fujiwara
Shuji TerayamaTomoko Yoneda
Marina Abramović
Maurizio Cattelan& Pierpaolo Ferrari
Keren Cytter
Tacita Dean
Hiroya Oku
Jim O'Rourke
David Peace
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Curators
Didier Faustino
Akiko Miyake
Angela Vettese
Assistant curators
Sumi Hayashi
Sachiko Namba
Exhibition Design
Bureau des Mésarchitectures
Catalogue & Graphic Design
Zak Kyes / Zak Group
Venue
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
Palazzetto Tito
Dorsoduro 2826, Venice

Directions
Vaporetto ACTV line 1, Ca' Rezzonico(Academia side). Follow the street until
Campo San Barnaba. Cross the campodiagonally until the Fondamenta di Rio
San Barnaba. Follow the canal fora few hundred feet (past the bridgeon the right) until the entrance ofPalazzetto Tito.
Information about the show
Tae Mori, Yoko Oyamada
The Japan Foundation
Europe, Middle East and Africa Section
Arts and Culture Dept.
+ 81-3-5369-6063
Press contact in Japan
Akiko Onishi
The Japan Foundation
venezia@jpf.go.jp
Press contact in Italy
Giorgia Gallina
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
press@bevilacqualamasa.it

Participants
Meiro Koizumi. Born in 1976 in Gunma Prefecture; lives and works in Yokohama.
Meiro Koizumi graduated from the International Christian University and studied
film at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His plot-based works
and performances, which are characterized by intense physical movement, are filledwith sensational violence. While presenting biting criticism of authority and social
norms, Koizumi reveals an underlying sense of vulnerability and humor. He has
held solo exhibitions such as MAM Project 009: Koizumi Meiro (Mori Art Museum,Tokyo, 2009), Broken Hero, Beautiful Afternoon (Artspace, Sydney, 2011), Defectin Vision (Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, 2012), and Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi(The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013).
Simon Fujiwara. Born in 1982 in London, Simon Fujiwara spent his childhood
between Japan, England, Spain and Africa. In dense dramas about personal relationships, family relations, politics, architecture and history, his work explores
biographies and ‘real-life’ narratives through a combination of performance, video,installation and short stories. Often appearing within his own works and assuming
various guises, from anthropologist to erotic novelist, he also works with a castof friends, family members and collaborators who present versions of themselves
and their own biographies as characters within his dramas. In linking fictionaland real people as well as locations and events, he explores the boundary between
the real and the imagined, often revealing the very fiction of such distinction.
Shuji Terayama. Born in 1935 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture. Terayama began
to write tanka and haiku poems in junior high school and submitted his work
to newspapers and magazines. Continuing to devote himself to poetry as a
student at Waseda University, he developed friendships with Taichi Yamada,Makoto Ooka and Shuntaro Tanikawa. In 1955, Terayama was forced to leave
the university due to illness. While publishing collections of poems and essays,
he began to write scripts for radio and TV dramas around 1959. In 1967, he formed
the Tenjo Sajiki theatre troupe with Tadanori Yokoo, Yutaka Higashi and Eiko Kujo
(later Kyoko). The group attracted a great deal of attention through a successionof avant-garde productions beginning with The Hunchback of Aomori, The Crimeof Fatso Ooyama and La Marie Vison. Terayama was also involved in producing
countless films, including a number of experimental works, based on his scripts,
which along with his theatre works earned him international acclaim. In 1983,
he died of cirrhosis of the liver in a Tokyo hospital. He was 47.
Tomoko Yoneda. Born in 1965 in Hyogo Prefecture; currently based in London.
Yoneda completed a masters course at the Royal College of Art in London
in 1991. Her ambitious work, based on the themes of memory and history,
has =a journalistic focus. She has shown her work in exhibitions such asBeyond Memory and Uncertainty (Shiseido Gallery, 2003), Non-Sect Radical,Contemporary Photography III (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2004), After the Thaw(Shugo Arts, 2005), Venice Biennale (2007), Hara Museum of ContemporaryArt (2008), Roppongi Crossing 2010: Can There Be Art? (Mori Art Museum, 2010),
Kuandu Biennale (Taipei) and the 2012 Kiev Biennale. Yoneda is scheduled
to hold a solo exhibition later in 2013, on Saturday, July 20, at the Tokyo
Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

Marina Abramović . Born in Belgrade and lives and works in New York. Since thebeginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović
has pioneered performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most important early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium.
Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actionsof everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest foremotional and spiritual transformation.
Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari (Toiletpaper). TOILETPAPER is apicture-based magazine founded in 2010 by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.
TOILETPAPER images have been reviewed by weekly and art magazines worldwide
and have appeared in special issues of magazines such as Vice and Hunger. In May
2012, TOILETPAPER was also exhibited on the High Line Billboard in New York City.
In the same year images taken from the first six issues were published in an anthology with selected narrative texts, which was reviewed in The New York Times’
Top 10 Photo Books. Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari are now working on theeighth issue, to be released in June 2013. Toiletpaper is published and distributedby Damiani Editore.
Keren Cytter. Born in Tel Aviv, and lives and works in New York. She creates films,
video installations and drawings that represent social realities through experimental
modes of storytelling. In her films, emotional status of the characters and sound/music effects are interwoven into the picture, sometimes monotonously and sometimes passionately, thus playing a very important role. Characterized by a non-linear,
cyclical logic, Cytter’s work consists of multiple layers of images including linguistic
conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. She also formed a theatregroup, D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe), and has presented theatre projects,
which consist of dance, video and music.
Tacita Dean. Born in Canterbury (UK) and lives and works in Berlin. The films,
drawings and other works by Tacita Dean are extremely original. Her recent film
portraits express something that neither painting nor photography can capture.
They are purely film. And while Dean can appreciate the past, her art avoids any
kind of academic approach. Dean’s art is carried by a sense of history, timeand place, light quality and the essence of the film itself. The focus of her subtle
but ambitious work is the truth of the moment, the film as a medium and thesensibilities of the individual.
Rirkrit Tiravanija. Lives and works in New York, Berlin and Chiang Mai. Since theearly 1990s, Tiravanija has explored a new aesthetic paradigm of interactivity.
He has cooked and served food to his audiences, set up a recording studio ina museum, reconstructed his apartment inside a gallery for visitors’ use, andprovided opportunities for numerous other everyday activities to occur within art
spaces. Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates situations in which visitors are invited
to participate or perform. In turn, their shared experiences activate the artwork,
giving it meaning and altering its form.

Hiroya Oku. Hiroya Oku currently lives in Tokyo. In 1992, Oku began publishing theHen: Suzuki-kun and Sato-kun series in the manga, Weekly Young Jump. He latercreated the HEN and 0 1 Zero One series, and followed in 2000 with the ongoingseries GANTZ, whose sales exceeded 20 million copies. In 2004, GANTZ was released
as an animated TV series, and in 2011 it became a live-action film.
Jim O'Rourke. Born in Chicago; currently living in Tokyo. In addition to building
bridges between contemporary and popular music as music director for the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company, O’Rourke has also earned a loyal following for
his work as a member of the band Sonic Youth and his participation in numerous
albums by various artists. He received a Grammy award for his production of Wilco’s
A Ghost is Born in 2004. O’Rourke is highly regarded as a prominent figure in thecurrent American music scene. Also well-versed in Japanese culture, he is active
in a variety of activities such as Akira Sakata and the Boredoms, and a critical reviewof the work of filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu.
David Peace. Born in West Yorkshire (UK) and lives in Tokyo. He is the author of theRed Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Nineteen
Eighty and Nineteen Eighty-Three), which was adapted into a three-part Channel 4series (2009); GB84 which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Award; andThe Damned Utd, the film version of which was released in 2009. Tokyo Year Zero,the first part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy, was published in 2007, and the secondpart, Occupied City, in 2009.

Curators
The architect and artist Didier Faustino lives and works in Paris, where he explores
the relationship between body and space. His international projects are characterized
by their fictional dimension, criticality, freedom of codes, and their ability to offer
new experiences to the individual and collective body. Several works comprise thecollections of major institutions, including MoMA, Gulbenkian and Beaubourg.
In 2009, Faustino curated Evento – a new artistic and urban event in Bordeaux.
He currently teaches at the Architectural Association in London, and he works
on several architectural projects in France and abroad.
Akiko Miyake is the co-founder and program director of the Center for Contemporary
Art, CCA Kitakyushu. Since CCA’s inauguration in 1997, she has curated morethan 80 projects and has published, edited and art directed over 70 titles in the CCA
Artists’ Book series, including a number of other editions such as Substantials,
a serial on experimental music. In 2001 she conceived and co-organized the ongoinginternational conference Bridge the Gap?, which continues to be held as amultidisciplinary event focusing on art, science and the humanities. In 2008,
she was appointed as one of the curators of the Yokohama Triennale.

Angela Vettese heads the graduate program in visual arts at the Iuav Universityof Venice, teaches at the Bocconi University in Milan and has been president of theBevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice since 2002. From 1995–04 she served
as curator at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, and from 2005–09 she was thedirector of the Galleria Civica in Modena. In addition to chairing the jury of the53rd Venice Biennale, Vettese has authored several books and essays. She has beena columnist for the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore for more than 25 years.
Sumi Hayashi was the curator of Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art from1989–12, where she organized a number of exhibitions including Is This Art? (1998)
and Sleeping / Dreaming / Awakening (2002), as well as the solo exhibitions ofRobert Ryman (2004), Gerhard Richter (2001, 2005) and Mark Rothko (1995, 2009).
She was appointed as commissioner for Japan’s participation in the 14th Asian Art
Biennale Bangladesh (2010) and is working on various art projects. Hayashi currentlyworks as an independent curator in Kobe.
After serving as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2006–11),
Sachiko Namba established the Japan-based I plus N Ltd. to organize art exhibitions
and workshops with a specific focus on socially engaged art practices. She is theauthor of Curating Contemporary Art in Japan: 1950s to the Present. Her curatorial
projects include Interweaving Cultures (2004, Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok),
Garden for Children (2010, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), and Breathing
Atolls: Japan-Maldives Contemporary Art Exhibition (2012, National Art Galleryof the Maldives, Malé, which traveled to Spiral, Tokyo).

Exhibition Design
Bureau des Mésarchitectures. Created in 2002 by Didier Faustino and Pascal
Mazoyer, the Bureau des Mésarchitectures works on different fields and scalesof architecture – from installation to experimentation, scenographies to devices—intensifying the senses and questioning the use of space.

Catalogue & Graphic Design
Zak Kyes / Zak Group. Zak Kyes is a London-based graphic designer. He founded
Zak Group in 2005, and since 2006 has been the art director of the Architectural
Association (AA), London. Zak Group is a design studio focusing on publication,identity, exhibition design and art direction for art, architecture and institutional
clients. The studio’s approach is defined by its active collaborations in ever-changing
constellations. The studio is engaged in complex projects that integrate graphic
design, publishing, research, strategy and architecture.

Images for press use
For press images, please contact Akiko Onishi (venezia@jpf.go.jp), The JapanFoundation, Tokyo, or Giorgia Gallina (press@bevilacqualamasa.it), Fondazione
Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice.
— Images are provided for one time use only and must not be stored for future use.
— Images must be credited with caption and credit line as provided.
— Images must not be cropped, edited, overlaid with texts or objects, or altered inany way.
— For use on the internet, the provided caption and credit line must accompany
with the images.
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1 Simon Fujiwara, The Personal Effects of Theo Grünberg
Installation view: Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, © 2010 Simon Fujiwara,		Courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle
2 Tomoko Yoneda, Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff underChiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, I, © 2010 Tomoko Yoneda, Courtesy ShugoArts
3 Shuji Terayama, Advertisement Poster for Tenjo Sajiki's Subscribers, 1967
Design: Tadanori Yokoo, Courtesy Poster Hari’s Company,© 2013 Eiko Terayama / Terayama World
4 Meiro Koizumi, Still from "City of Poem and Bleed”, © 2013 Meiro Koizumi