“My Organs Lying on the Ground” (2024, 11 min film)
Tue17 Sep – Mon 14 Oct, 2024
Opening hours: 11:00-19:00 (last entry 18:45)
Closed: Mondays
＜Exhibition Outline＞
CREATIVE HUB UENO “es” is pleased to announce Shinobu Soejima’s solo exhibition “My Organs Lying on the Ground: hub circulation” being held from September 17 (Tue) to October 14 (Mon), 2024.
Shinobu Soejima makes short films and video works stop-motion animation techniques. She is a young filmmaker who has attracted international attention, awarded the Ecumenical Jury Special Mention Award at the 86th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
As part of her latest work, “My Organs Lying on the Ground” (2024, 11 min film), the exhibition will be developed into a video installation in conjunction with CREATIVE HUB UENO “es”. The gallery space will represent an internal organ while being presented inside Ueno Station – a major hub of Tokyo – in an attempt to create a circulation between the city and the individual.
＜Exhibition Artworks＞
“My Organs Lying on the Ground” (2024, 11 min film)
“My Organs Lying on the Ground” (2024, 11 min film) will be presented in a director’s cut version by, specially edited for this exhibition. The film will be presented as a re-edited video installation on three different screens. Some puppets and sets used in the animation production will also be displayed.
■About “My Organs Lying on the Ground” (2024, 11 min film)
“My Organs Lying on the Ground” is an 11 minute stop-motion animation, based on a Japanese folk belief called Womb Diving (“Tainai Kuguri” ) or the “unknown hollow spiritual world”. In Japanese the word for womb, “tainai”, not only refers to the female organ of the uterus, but also refers to the animistic spiritual hollow space inside a Buddhist statue. This is a space of connection, between life and afterlife, death and life. There, the boundaries between organism and matter dissolve, and outer and inner worlds are continually inverted. Alternatively, the dichotomous structures of subject and object, inside and outside, are deconstructed, and the murky relationship between our bodies and the land itself is made visible.
＜Artist’s Statement＞
I define animation as “the power to bring back from death to life”, and a means to fracture and dissolve the boundaries between opposites — inside and outside, living and non-living, subject and object, death and life — by animating organic objects such as rice, meat, insects, and puppets.
I wonder, can we question the muddled relationship between our bodies and the land itself?
When animating puppets and organic objects, parts of the physical body are sometimes transferred to one side because they interfere with each other or become dirty, the friction between opposites, like a gift-giving relationship, melts the boundaries between different things like subject and object, inside and outside.
I call this phenomenon the “inside-out/outside-in cycle”sytems. We eat grain grown from the soil, we excrete it, and what we excrete returns to the soil, from which grain grows again… We all live in this cycle of inside and outside systems.
My internal organs can become other people’s internal organs, or other people’s internal organs can become my internal organs. I am the other, and the other world is me… Is this kind of multispecies thinking perhaps a way of rethinking the relationship between the subject and the other? I am looking for ways to reconcile these boundaries, using the power of animation and the traditional functions of the puppet. I believe today, we need the art of what I see as connecting with others on the opposite shore.
＜Artist＞
Shinobu Soejima
Shinobu Soejima produces video works, stop-motion animation films, photographs and sculptures. She defines animation as “the power to bring back from death to life”, and tries to create a vision of a possible spiritual dimension.
Her short films and video of stop-motion animation actively incorporate organic matter, including themes of “the impermanency of things” and conflicting ideas such as life and death, or light and shadow.
Her films have been awarded at film festivals and shown at exhibitions across Japan and abroad, including the Ecumenical Jury Special Mention Award at the 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Jury Recommended Film at the 22nd Japan Media Arts Festival, and the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2018 Kimura Eriko Award.
Artist website
https://www.shinobusoejima.com
Past Exhibitions
2018 the Jury Recommended Film at the 22nd Japan Media Arts Festival
2018 the Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2018 Kimura Eriko Award
2022 the Ecumenical Jury Special Mention Award at the 68th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
2023 Solo Exhibition “Blink in the Desert, ASK? Gallery Space Kimura, Tokyo
