Simon Fujiwara

New Pompidou

In New Pompidou, artist Simon Fujiwara revisits personal memories and professional aspirations while enacting a procession that takes a sculpture of his through the streets of Paris to the Pompidou Centre, the building that radically transformed his dreams of becoming an architect.

Hello

Hello explores changes in two people’s working lives: a Mexican trash picker who separates and collects recyclable materials from landfills to sell by the kilo, and a German freelance computer-animation designer working for the advertising industry in Berlin. The double interview is controlled and manipulated by a computer-generated severed hand which Maria describes as an object once discovered in the trash while working in the violent northern town of Mexicali. This CGI hand was in turn produced by Max, who was born with no arms, and sought refuge in computer-imaging as a means to operate and manipulate a digital reality.

Joanne

Joanne is a model, a teacher, a fighter, a chameleon. But when her private semi-nude photos went public, this woman of many talents came to be simply known as 'the topless teacher'. Together with her former student, artist Simon Fujiwara, she seeks to reclaim her image through social media and branding tactics. Shifting between advertisement and portraiture, this meta-narrative on identity manages to infuse playfulness in its layered commentary on who you are and how you're seen.

Joanne

Joanne is a model, a teacher, a fighter, a chameleon. But when her private semi-nude photos went public, this woman of many talents came to be simply known as 'the topless teacher'. Together with her former student, artist Simon Fujiwara, she seeks to reclaim her image through social media and branding tactics. Shifting between advertisement and portraiture, this meta-narrative on identity manages to infuse playfulness in its layered commentary on who you are and how you're seen.

The Mirror Stage

At the age of 11, the artist encountered an abstract painting by Patrick Heron in his hometown museum of Tate St Ives, Cornwall. According to Fujiwara, the painting acted as a "mirror to his soul" and elicited both an artistic and a sexual awakening. In The Mirror Stage, he is seen helping a young actor to portray himself in a theatrical reimagining of that moment.

Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery)

In Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery) (2011), Fujiwara uses a difficult relationship with a distant father as the starting point for a humorous, circuitous video that reenacts a real-life experience through the “rehearsal” of a screenplay about it. Fujiwara visited Japan to reconnect with his father, and using craft as a kind of catharsis, they together created a tea set in the style of mid-twentieth-century British ceramist Bernard Leach. The tea set becomes the central prop in the titular rehearsal depicted in the film, with the artist in the role of the son and an actor as his father. The video progresses through enmeshed layers of fiction and reality, culminating in a moment of destruction and release.