Takafumi Hara / text

Signs of Memory

 

The artistic work of Takafumi Hara cannot be subsumed in classical art terms. It is tied to a particular place, it is short-dated, it cannot be exhibited in a gallery, cannot be lent, cannot be sold. Above all, it is not an autonomous product of the artist, but it emanates in collaboration with a great number of other people, people without any artistic background, “simple” people. Hara takes his long-term project “signs of memory” into villages, city quarters or streets where social and cultural upheavals are or have taken place, such as the Japanese village of Uragawara, Auguststraße in Berlin or the “Hafenviertel” in Münster. Hara begins with interviewing inhabitants then the artwork is created with the material. Recollection are transformed into short, but significant texts and symbolical pictures, transferred to coloured panels and then mounted into windows of buildings in the respective places. Thus, the dialogue between artist and inhabitant becomes a dialogue between inhabitant and viewer, between the private and the public, between Inside and Outside, between the past and the present...