SHIMABUKU EXHIBITION

New National Museum of Monaco

Finished

Shimabuku's exhibition, The Siren of 165 Meters and Other Stories tells the adventures of the artist Shimabuku around the world, from his native Japan to the Principality of Monaco, through Brazil, Australia and many other countries, in the manner of an epic poem.

The artist's texts form the narrative thread of a journey that brings together some twenty installations, films, sculptures, photographs, made over the last thirty years.

Biography of Shimabuku

Shimabuku was born in Kobe in 1969. He studied at the College of Art in Osaka and then at the Art Institute in San Francisco before moving to Berlin in 2004 where he lived for twelve years. Since 2016, he has been living in Naha, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, where his family is originally from.

His works at the Museum

From the oldest works conceived in the Kobe region, whose topography he readily compares to that of the Riviera, to the latest installations produced in Monaco, Shimabuku's work is nourished by the deep attention he pays to his environment. In the course of his travels, he appropriates elements of the landscape or popular culture to carry out experimental poetic actions associating with humour performance, music or cooking.

Shimabuku exhibition, history

When he discovers in Fukuoka the legend and the relics of a mermaid whose body was 165 meters long, he decides to appropriate and extend this story and buys himself a long rope also measuring 165 meters. Taken all around the world, this rope allows him to get closer to the fish-woman and becomes a vector that links fiction to reality, the past to the present, and Japan to the different countries in which the work is presented. Acquired by the New National Museum of Monaco in 2018, the installation Je voyage avec une sirène de 165 mètres (1998 - in progress) is the starting point of the exhibition and is enriched by new artefacts produced in Monaco by various craftsmen invited to appropriate this story in their turn.

His stories 

Each Shimabuku travel story takes the form of a poetic-philosophical experience, questioning our relationship to otherness and engaging in individual or collective action of care and attention. Initiated on the beach of Norihama after the Tsunami of 2011, the installation Eriger is the subject of a new specific production realized in Monaco following the poem - protocol established by the artist :

Set things straight. Put things upright and things lying down. Place trees and stones on the beach upright. With the help of many people, we will place many things upright. We will try to gather our energy to place very large trees upright. Then maybe something in our hearts will stand upright. (Shimabuku)

Exhibition at the National Museum of Monaco

Information on the Monaco exhibition

The exhibition La Sirène de 165 mètres et autres histoires, curated by Célia Bernasconi, will be accompanied by a catalog co-published by the NMNM and Berlin publisher Manuel Raeder (Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite), with previously unpublished texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Le Restif and Rirkrit Tiravanija, in French and English.