Haus der Matsubara feat. Kazuna Taguchi bei Significant Other, Wien

Ausstellungstext:

As part of a new series with the title SOSO - an initiative to cooperate with kindred spaces and projects - Significant Other has invited Haus der Matsubara, an antique shop founded by Soshiro Matsubara in 2017, to take over their premises and launch a publication by Kazuna Taguchi alongside an exhibition of her work as well as a selection of current available stock. 

Carefully acquired over time the gathering and collecting of images as well as objects from old magazines or antique shops is central to Matsubara’s practice. His personal cabinet seamlessly moves from installation, to exhibition, to an Instagram online shop, where part of the collection is sold. Haus der Matsubara features a distinct and quirky selection ranging from playful, childish drawings to strange amateur pieces as well as elaborate, surrealistic works - perhaps revealing more about the collector himself than anything else.

Kazuna Taguchi’s approach follows a related pattern. Working her way from image clippings Taguchi constructs the female figure at her own discretion, the result is then painted or drawn which in turn is photographed and carefully manipulated in the darkroom it finds its final expression in a photographic print. The merger of sourced reproductions, drawn textures and photographed surfaces simulates a realism that stands in direct opposition to the history of portraiture, since this person never did nor ever will exist. Surprisingly, the dedicated if not obsessive analogue process  resonates strongly with the current de- and re-construction of the digital ‘self’ as seen in online platforms, where a new and ever-changing identity can be shaped by a selective and manipulative documentation of oneself. Taguchi’s approach though is more subtle and considerate: by not existing, the portrayed women reveal themselves as masks of those who might exist, entrancing us in their ghostly existence of womanhood.

Kazuna Taguchi (b. 1979, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Vienna. Major solo and group exhibitions include Reading Images: The Time of photography, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2019) the eyes of eurydice, void+, Tokyo (2019) Retrospective of museum collection: 2014 → 1890, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2018) wienfluss, Museum Haus Kasuya, Kanagawa (2017) Ecce Homo: The Human Images in Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2016) Sleeping Beauty, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2014) somewhere between me and this world - Japanese contemporary photography, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2012) Pandemonium, XYZ collective, Tokyo (2012) andYOKOHAMA TRIENNALE 2011: OUR MAGIC HOUR, Yokohama Museum of Art (2011) 

In 2008 she won the Namura Priza and in 2010 The Gotoh Memorial Prize Foudation Newcomer’s prize of art.