“How do we interpret the past, how do we create a collective historical memory?”
Kioku ni tsuite
mhk-collective
Research about the culture of Japanese art production and its political significance up to 1945. Therefore the intercultural entanglements between Germany and Japan shall be visualised through the technique of mapping.
MOMM
Museum of Missing Memories
Japanese propaganda in the early 20th century. An illustration of commercial construction of memory and the sovereignty of interpretation.
Museums
>Appropriate Japan< focuses on the influence of Western art and culture on the construction of a Japanese national identity and how Japan transferred these values to its colonies of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
Mauthausen
Memorial
An intercultural translation of the exhibition process at Mauthausen Memorial Site.
::: My work focuses on the design of remembrance by comparing Japanese and German history and the role of the visual arts in the construction of national identity.
Since the clarification of modern Japan’s self-understanding has emerged almost exclusively under the aspect of the appropriation of Western concepts in the second half of the 19th century, the issue of cultural identity in modernizing Japan has been perceived as a controversial one by intellectuals of the time. My research seeks to examine the creation of these new social possibilities and discourses translated from Western patterns of cultural activity, and how these modes of creativity formed new social spaces and also shaped Japanese conceptions of social order, especially in the mobilisation for war.
::: As a scenographer, I see exhibitions as places of three-dimensionality that can be experienced, heterotopias in Foucault’s sense. As a place of this encounter with its history, the objects shown, its comprehensible traces, the spatial context in which an exhibition takes place has a decisive influence.
The developed spatial design creates specific atmospheres, stimulates and triggers behaviour, promotes communication and awakens associations, it puts visitors in a mood and sensitises them to perceptions. My understanding of exhibitions is to construct spaces by drawing attention to them and stimulating visitor behaviour.
