Meiro Koizumi: Today My Empire Sings / Cécile B. Evans: What the Heart Wants

Meiro Koizumi: Today My Empire Sings
This fall De Hallen Haarlem presents the first museum solo exhibition of work by Meiro Koizumi (1976, Gunma) in the Netherlands. One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art in Japan, Koizumi engages in social and historical critique in video and performance works that aim for high affective impact through subtle, sometimes provocative manipulation of his performers’ emotions. In Today My Empire Sings, he presents recent and new work.

The power relationship between authority and subject, and the tension between collective ideals and individual expression constitute major themes in Koizumi’s work. Mining various symbolic representations of Japanese national identity and culture, like the heroic figure of the kamikaze pilot, or the elusive Japanese emperor, the artist weaves complex connections between personal subjective experience and national trauma. Simultaneously transgressive and poetic, his works explore the potential of conflict, social and emotional, looking for the possibility of transformation through cathartic experience.

The exhibition includes Koizumi’s recent series of paintings, “Air,” that was the source of recent controversy in Japan. For this series Koizumi enlarged existing (news) photographs of public appearances of the emperor: on tour during a ceremonial visit, or shown with the imperial family in a traditional Japanese interior setting in the official state portrait. Koizumi subsequently meticulously retouched the photographs with oil paint, making the emperor vanish from them, and imbuing the images with a ghostly absence. Central to Today My Empire Sings is a new video installation, revisiting the imperial subject matter of “Air.” Filmed during the annual anti-emperor rally that takes place in Tokyo on August 15, Koizumi introduced actors and musicians in the volatile, heavily policed environment, directing them towards an intense climax.

The solo exhibition of Meiro Koizumi is made possible with the support of Outset Netherlands.
 

Cécile B. Evans: What the Heart Wants
Alongside Koizumi’s exhibition, De Hallen Haarlem presents a solo exhibition of the Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans. What the Heart Wants is her first museum exhibition in the Netherlands. For her eponymous video installation around protagonist HYPER, that premiered recently at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Evans is transforming the second floor of De Hallen Haarlem into an immersive environment. Accompanying What the Heart Wants, the installation Working on What the Heart Wants is also on view, in which Evans offers a glimpse of the work’s production process.

Following recent exhibitions at De Hallen Haarlem such as the group show Superficial Hygiene (2014), Melanie Gilligan’s The Common Sense (2015) and recently Inflected Objects, Cécile B. Evans’s What the Heart Wants offers a perspective on issues related to the human condition in an increasingly globalized and technology driven world. What influence do digital technologies have on the way in which we communicate with each other and share our feelings? What is the influence—on our integrity, our privacy, and our sense of humanity—of an ever-increasing degree of abstraction and intelligence behind the interfaces that we use every day? The implications of these developments, both positive and negative, have been an important catalyst in Evans’s artistic practice in recent years.

The universe of What the Heart Wants (2016) proposes a speculative version of what it could mean to be human in a future where a single system, which controls such aspects of our lives, has limitless power. This system—which has evolved to take the form of a woman named HYPER—endeavors to better humankind but inevitably encounters difficulties when her choices, motivated by technological progress, impact essential questions such as: who gets to be a person, an individual? Through interactions between a host of characters (a workers’ collective of disembodied ears, a memory from the past, a group of highly gifted young pupils, a trio of disbanded lovers) this question is extended to examine a variety of issues of race, sex, love, death, human rights and privilege.

The video installation What the Heart Wants has been commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale, and was co-produced by the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem, Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthalle Winterthur. The work has been acquired by the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem for its collection.

The solo exhibition of Cécile B. Evans is made possible by Ammodo.
 

On display in the Frans Hals Museum: New & Old
Gavin Wade: Z is for Zoo
From August 27 to December 11, artist-curator Gavin Wade (1971, United Kingdom) is creating an intervention in the permanent collection presentation of the Frans Hals Museum within the scope of New & Old. Wade’s work combines, conflates and fictionalises histories and methods of exhibiting. An artwork only exists when it is in the act of displaying. In storage the artwork is nothing more than an artefact, materials, or stuff waiting to come back “to life” as art again. He believes that how you exhibit is just as important as what you exhibit. These notions constitute the point of departure for Wade’s intervention in the Frans Hals Museum. He creates sculptures that function as display units—systems on which works from the museum’s old, modern and contemporary art collections are displayed as a temporary zoological garden.