Thomas Hirschhorn & Santiago Sierra Radical Democracy

With reference by Sanya Labour Welfare Hall Action Committee
July 21–August 21, 2016

ASAKUSA
1-6-16 Nishi-Asakusa, Taito
Tokyo 111-0035
Japan
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ASAKUSA is delighted to announce the exhibition Radical Democracy with artists Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, whose art practices engage with selected social groups, often facing ethical questions. The exhibited works articulate divisive fissures of political and economic disparities existing beyond sanctioned consensus, and provoke the agonistic practice of valuing and sustaining the dissent—democratic dialectics advocated by art critic Claire Bishop. The differing context of their challenges suggests art’s expansive potential as well as its limitations, and forms a critical position to comment on Tokyo’s political landscape imbued by media campaigns and internalisation of power structures. The exhibition includes distribution materials by Sanya Labor Welfare Hall Action Committee, a local support group for the largest day-labourers’ district in Tokyo.

Using materials such as tinfoil, Xerox copies, adhesive tape, and cardboard, Thomas Hirschhorn (b.1957) gives form to cultural critique and composes questions about consumerism, media spectacle, aesthetic value and moral responsibility. Since 1999, Hirschhorn has dedicated four monuments to his most admired philosophers―Spinoza, Bataille, Deleuze, and Gramsci. Paid residents of Forest Houses, in the South Bronx, New York built his last endeavor, Gramsci Monument (2013). In this work, the artist pays homage to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) by following his cultural strategy of a “war of position,” which describes a process of building strength in social foundations by creating alternative institutions and intellectual resources of a civil society. The temporary monument, now demolished, appeared as an outdoor assemblage of plywood shelters comprised of a community library, bar, lecture platform, rooms for children’s workshops, and an onsite radio station running daily programs to promote leaning, discursive and other expressive practices to generate an autonomous culture. The structure constituted a critique against urban consumerism, which deprives the fundamental freedom to think and voice as individuals. Radical Democracy includes the artist’s lecture slides, interview, and texts, as well as a selection of publications by and about the four philosophers.

Marked by sensations of unease and discomfort, Santiago Sierra‘s (b.1966) work captures body politics exhumed by the conditions of market capitalism. Tattooing a continuous line across the backs of four prostitutes for the price of a heroin shot, having paid workers sit inside cardboard boxes or confining a man behind a brick wall for 15 days within a museum; his judiciary-based instructions make power structures visible, as marginalized individuals are often displayed as spectacles in material dimensions of their contracts. In 133 Persons Who Dyed Their Hair Blonde (2001), Sierra called illegal street vendors—mostly immigrants from China, Bangladesh, Senegal and South Italy―to congregate at the warehouse and have their hair dyed blonde within the site of the Venice Biennale. The action highlighted the vendors’ parasitical presence at the very intersection of art and tourism, and inscribed a situation inescapable for visitors to confront. The hour-long video shown in the exhibition documents an assembly of the stateless immigrants and refugees who gathered to receive 50 EUR in hand. The scene foregrounds the socio-economic hegemony and examines the conditions of racial bias at the heart of a cultural olympiad.

According to Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Radical Democracy does not only accept dissent and antagonisms but also depends on it, and argues that there are oppressive power relations in society that must be made visible, re-negotiated, and altered. The exhibition urges a crucial importance to seek intrinsic borders of difference in a seemingly homogeneous society. The following questions may be contested: what emotive prompts evoke questions of ethics? What instigates desire to move beyond consensual intertia? How is it possible to effectively negotiate between social imagination and social reality?

Radical Democracy is curated by ASAKUSA and Dr. Masaru Araki, scholar of political philosophy and Vice-President of Okayama University. Special thanks to Sanya Labour Welfare Action Committee for providing their distribution materials, and Embassy of Switzerland in Japan for their support to realize this exhibition.

ASAKUSA is a 40 square-meter exhibition venue for contemporary art programmes committed to advancing curatorial collaboration and practices.