manipulated photography, video, installations
Shunji
Hori (1967) lives and works in Amsterdam, currently artist-in-residence at
the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. His work deals with the human body
and nature and takes the form of video, installations and photography.
Science (specially biology and medical sciences), together with philosophy,
serves as a major source of inspiration. The interesting thing about science
is the way that it reveals aspects of reality which totally contradicts
and undermines the way we see the world. The world proves to be stranger
than imagined and counter intuitive. Science and art are trying to help
making sense of the world, instead problematizes it even more.
The portraits are a series of 6 construction workers from Amsterdam. The work appears to be straightforward portraits but in fact they've been heavily manipulated. It focus on the skin, each face being reconstructed using the artist's own skin surface. Through the precise superimposition of two different realities, a third reality is created. Instead of creating a fiction that bears no resemblance to the original subject, the piece remains very close to it. The tension is created when these two very different realities clash head on.
In the K12 project, a live culture of E. Coli bacteria react to the movement of people in the installation space triggering and controlling the projection and sound in the room. Central to the concept of K12 is the introduction of organic or living matter as an art material, something that is embodied and alive and not being merely a simulation, a virtuality. Another important aspect of k12 is the idea of the interfacing of different realities, connecting the micro/macro dimensions, and relating different organisms: bacteria/human. This connection provides a way of feeling or experiencing the microscopic in the space. In this sense we can say that our senses are amplified and extended, following the information cycling though the installation as it travels through systems that differ in scale (macor/micro) and organization (living/electronic). Signals propagate in very different guises (electronic, metabolic in the cellular level, genetic, acoustic and optic) through the electronic and biological.
Shunji Hori is seeking to collaborate biologists to work on the bacteria project - part two of the k12 project (see image 3), which involves a dancer interacting with the bacteria via bio-monitors (heart, temperature, pulse, etc). It's a dance piece in which the performer "dances" with the bacteria. The bacteria controls the projection and the music score in which the performer has to improvise. Other scientists he is interested in collaborating with are medical scientists/biologists interested exploring the subject of the human body.At the moment he is working on a project that involves creating an object based on the idea of inside versus outside of the body; the living body versus the dead corpse.
