Seiichi Furuya
“Mémoires” is the first solo exhibition in Berlin by the Japanese-born, Graz, Austria-based artist Seiichi Furuya. Whether it is a coincidence or not, the show––with its twenty-five photographs, five artist’s books, and slide projection of eighty-one images––seems like a commentary on the many official events planned this year for the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. In essence, the show emphasizes how difficult it is to remember through photography and how knowledge of a larger history can influence the way one looks at photographic images from a specific time.
Furuya lived with his family in the GDR from 1985 to 1987 in order to work for a Japanese construction company, an assignment that was cut short by the early death of his spouse, and in this exhibition he presents photographs from this time in his life. Photography here acts more as a reserve of the artist’s memories than of a society’s. Indeed, the two photographs of the Berlin Wall included in the show merely serve as markers of the specific time frame in which the quotidian history of a relationship unfolds. Furuya photographed the socialist environment as a detached observer with a mixture of interest and distance. His subjects are often lit from the side or behind, as in the group of spectators on the fringe of an East Berlin May Day demonstration or the two female acrobats in bikinis getting ready for their performance at a sports festival. The high-rise apartments on Leipziger Straße in Berlin’s Mitte district seem abandoned, and a neon sign in Dresden announcing the victory of socialism, photographed at dusk, seems to render an empty pronouncement.
In contrast, Furuya presents the two people closest to him quite differently. Again and again, he photographs his wife, Christine, who waged a draining battle against a serious illness, with a direct gaze at the camera. On a cushion, however, sleeps a child, too young to have any premonition of approaching historical, or even familial, upheaval.
Translated from German by Diana Reese.
