Rediscover project is exhibiting at “Invitation from the Labyrinth – On the Memory of Absurdity and Loss” at ASTER Curator Museum in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan.

A year has passed since the Noto Peninsula earthquake.
On the first day of the year 2024, we witnessed an absurdity that suddenly appeared in our daily lives. Like yesterday turning into today, like sleeping at night and waking up in the morning, like a person who has gone out returning home, we cannot avoid the absurdity that interrupts our natural sequence of daily life. Always.
In this exhibition, artists with different roots will present works about the absurdity of reality and memories of loss. The artists of “Intervention in the Labyrinth,” an exhibition held at the Mikke Gallery in Tokyo in October 2024, have reworked the exhibition in a way that reflects on the Noto Peninsula earthquake.
Takanosuke Yasui is an artist whose sculptures and paintings depict people in the city at the mercy of absurdity. He has been reporting on the town of Ogatsu, Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which was devastated by the tsunami that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake, and has captured in his works the earnest and sensible lives of the people who live with the sea.
Anri Ikeda, who has been collecting textures of family belongings and memorabilia to create works as if they were specimens of memories, walked the streets of Noto this time and interviewed local people about their memories of the disaster to create a new work.
At first glance, Yao qingmei’s video work, which features a former socialist soprano saint saint singing patriotic songs, appears to have nothing to do with loss or absurdity, but after a while the image is cut off and returns to the beginning. The image of a singer who sings, no matter how much she sings, is sure to be linked to the memories of sorrow and absurdity in the hearts of all who see it.
The exhibition also features works from the Rediscover Project, a project to collect and organize kuze porcelain broken in the Noto Peninsula earthquake-stricken area.
The stories spun by the artists intersect with each other like a labyrinth, and as you view the works, the characters in the stories will overlap with your own image. The sadness that we all carry in our hearts is connected to someone else’s, and we cannot remain unrelated to others.
1/1 Miwa Kutsuna