Yuki Okumura im Gespräch mit Pierre Bal-Blanc

Exhibition talk:

Yuki Okumura in conversation with Pierre Bal-Blanc (in English)

An event organized by the Secession Friends

Yuki Okumura was born in 1978 in Aomori, Japan, and lives and works mainly in the Central European time zone. Fascinated by our fundamental confinement to a particular body that itself is chained to the here and now and informed by his own experience as a translator, Okumura's oeuvre comprises a growing list of escape attempts from identity, individuality, and egocentrism by exploring language, memory, chance-oriented methodologies and site-specific conditions and contexts. His recent projects explore a set of simple instructions after conceptual art as a translational device to go beyond time, space, and biography and, through its ultimate failure, to generate the most genuine form of self-portraiture and auto-biography of the performer as a lived body or embodied life.

Recent solo exhibitions include Aftermath of Hands-on Sessions on Various Nonactive Pos+tures to Keep Oneself Somehow Carried Away, gallery αM, Tokyo, 2024; 136 Locations – 956 Intersections, 20 Albert Road, Glasgow, 2024; Yuki Okumura, Saint-Martin Bookshop, Brussels, 2022; and The Man Who, An Ephemeral Archive, Keio University Art Center, Tokyo, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include u – New Project Spaces, Kunsthalle Zürich Backrooms, Zurich, 2024; A Snowball's Chance in Heaven, Kyoto University of the Arts, Kyoto, 2023; November, 2-12-4 Higashiazabu, Minatoku, Tokyo (taking part as a member of N.E. One &c), 2023; Last Terminal: Reflections on The Coming Apocalypse, Part 6: The Siphon, Rib, Rotterdam, 2022; Aichi Triennale 2022, Aichi Arts Center, Aichi, 2022; and Landslide to be lived off and/or tongues to be deadpan, MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, 2021.

Pierre Bal-Blanc was born in 1965 in Ugine in the Savoy region of France. He lives and works between Paris and Athens. In his practice as a freelance curator and essayist, Pierre Bal-Blanc reflects upon institutional frameworks and broad histories of performance art. Between 2003 and 2014, Pierre Bal Blanc was the director of the CAC Brétigny art centre, where he created his first scores for performance exhibitions, including La Monnaie vivante/Living Currency (CAC Brétigny/ Micadanses, 2005-06; Stuk Leuven, 2007; Tate Modern London, 2008; MoMA Warsaw, 6th Berlin Biennale, 2010). In 2017, Sternberg Press published Project Phalanstère, a book which looks back on the experiments he carried out together with his team during his tenure at CAC Brétigny. He has also published The Death of the Audience (Secession, Vienna, 2010) and Soleil Politique (exhibition catalogue, Museion Bolzano 2015) Vienna, 2010) and Soleil Politique (catalogue Museion Bolzano 2015).

He was also a co-curator of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, under the artistic direction of Adam Szymczyk, and a guest curator of the 7th Lyon Biennial, under the direction of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon. In 2017, in collaboration with guest artists, he produced the exhibition Collective Exhibition for a Single Body at documenta 14, before creating a new version of this project in 2019, The Private Score, based on works from the Kontakt Collection. Commissioned by the Kontakt Collection and focusing on artists from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, this project was first shown in Vienna and at the M Museum in Leuven, before travelling to the Galerias Municipais in Lisbon in 2021, as well as to the National Art Museum of Romania in 2023. The score was published by Paraguay Press in 2019. In 2022, he published Notes sur la documenta 14 (The Continuum Was Performed in the Following Manner) (NERO-CAC Geneve). He has recently opened a solo exhibition of work by Tomislav Gotovac at the MSU Zagreb. He has recently curated a solo exhibition of Cezary Bodzianowski (1968, Poland) for the Maura Greco Foundation in Naples, as well as a solo exhibition of Adrian Paci (1969, Albania) for the Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana.