COVID-19 May 2020
2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
5:49 minutes
Hikaru Fujii
COVID-19 May 2020 by Hikaru Fujii was filmed during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. For this work Fujii filmed the group exhibition Things Entangling, the final phase of a collaboration between KADIST and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. At the time that the first Covid-19 lockdowns were instated in Japan, the exhibition was fully installed, but it was not accessible to the public for an indeterminate duration. As such, Fujii’s video illustrates an inaccessible space due to a public health catastrophe: a paradoxical and dizzying gesture on the part of an artist who has consistently filmed other inaccessible places. Much of Fujii’s work engages with the Fukushima-Daiichi Power Station, where a major nuclear accident occured in 2011, and everyday life was more or less interrupted for an undetermined period of time. Similarly, this work is a haunting documentation of cultural production in stasis. Fujii unintentionally became the exhibition’s first visitor, capturing it in all its unreality: that of an exhibition affected, on pause, on hold, and in the dark. The video depicts a glimpse into the reverberations of confinement, social distancing, quarantines, city lockdowns, and closed borders. The conceits of the artworks in the exhibition, which addressed global political, economic, social, and environmental crises, were compounded by the solitude of the museum. The artworks, which predicted and cautions against future catastrophes, violence, and human extinction, were magnified in the context of the pandemic.
Hikaru Fujii utilizes film to bridge art and social activism. To engage with specific historical moments and social issues related to systems of dominance, he creates various forms of dialogue in order to document tensions and seek out discourse and critique. Through films and installations, he undertakes extensive research and fieldwork to investigate existing systems and structures, and to probe into hegemonic power embedded in social relations and discourses. Rather than presenting his research matter-of-fact, his work attempts to reinterpret events from contemporary issues and perspectives, exploring the potentiality for political resistance.
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