A Foundation
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool
L1 OBY
18 September - 28 November 2010
Sachiko Abe’s work encompasses, performance, drawing, film and sculptural installations using cut papers accumulated over the last seven years. Her practice explores duration, repetition and constraints. The artist will be performing at A Foundation for the Touched - The Liverpool Biennial and exhibiting drawings completed during a residency in the city. A Foundation has commissioned a film by Ben Rivers that will be shown during each performance.
Since 1997 Sachiko Abe has explored regimes of subjectivity which are imposed by society, most explicitly in a series of performance works. Perhaps, there is a paradox presented to us that started with the creation of artworks after leaving the Self Defence Forces in Japan because "the life of artists seemed so free."’
Elevator Girl Friend in which she acted outside of the conventional behaviour of the demure elevator assistants who were a common sight in big department stores,,”While the job sounds boring, it was a “dream job” for young girls because it was believed then that only the most beautiful and elegant person could be assigned to be an elevator girl.”
The more recent works continue to explore disquieting routines that provoke anxiety and touch us in ways we cannot explain. In Cut Papers the artist invites the audience to experience an intimate space in which the constant snipping of scissor blades is the only measure of time passing.
At A Foundation Liverpool there was a durational performance for The Liverpool Biennial but be warned .“My work is neither beautiful nor meditational.”
Perhaps, an aesthetic paradox that locates the artist at the centre of a field of reciprocal subjectivity, she is an object of the gaze that returns the subject to themselves by activating a feedback loop.
Cut Papers is a performance that creates a surplus of meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy. It is this scenic space of perception and production that is the focus of the work.
Sachiko Abe presented the performance in an environment of large scale sculptural interventions at the Furnace gallery together with a new large scale drawing work produced during her 2010 residency with A Foundation
Funded by the Pola Foundation. the drawing is an intricate graphic weave produced by intensive durational periods of drawing which might be best apporached through the dimension of the fold as expressed by French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Like Cut Papers the drawings invite us to contemplate the intensity of ideas which accumulate and are disseminated in the transformation of a white sheet of paper into medium of communication.