Inder Kommen Sie / It’s a Comedy

2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

25 min

Meiro Koizumi

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This video installation was made for the exhibition “Journey to the West” held in January 2012 in New Delhi, where a group of curators invited six Japanese artists to produce a work to be made around the relationship between Japan and India. In the framework of this exhibition, Meiro Koizumi decided to use a controversial book of modern Japanese history The Judgement of Justice Radhabinod Pal , as material for his work. Koizumi created a performance combining the paradoxical context of this book with monstrous representation of Indian gods. The central performer had to read the Judgement of Pal as seriously as possible, while two other performers on the side had to make a comedy out of the situation. It is Koizumi’s attempt to create a new god-like mythical figure that embodies the contradiction inscribed within modern Japanese history and identity. The context of this work has much to do with the trial held in Tokyo right after the war to judge Japanese war criminals. Judge Pal was the only Asian judge to be invited to the trial, and he was the only one that found all the defendants not guilty.

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Meiro Koizumi is a Japanese video and performing artist, born in 1976. He has built a compelling body of work that deals with power dynamics on scales from the familial to the national, and examines questions of political and psychological control. Implicating himself, his performers, and the viewer through choreographed emotional manipulations, Koizumi creates works that straddle the uncomfortable and indefinable line between cruelty and comedy. Meiro Koizumi was born in Gunma, Japan in 1976. He lives and works in Yokohama, Japan.

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Colors:

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• contradiction.n.01
• comedy.n.01
• japanese.a.01
• india.n.01
• paradox.n.01
• world_war_ii.n.01