Art World
Carsten Nicolai Will Take Over an Entire Museum in Japan
Although the show features many older works, Nicolai insists it's not a retrospective.
Amah-Rose Abrams
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Artist and musician Carsten Nicolai will take over the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Greater Tokyo in its entirety on the occasion of the first exhibition of his work in a Japanese museum in fifteen years.
The show conveniently opens ahead of Art Basel Hong Kong, and will run from March 18–May 14, 2017.
Nicolai will install six works in total at the museum for the exhibition entitled “Parallax,” varying from his sound installations to large-scale projection works. The word Parallax, derived from the Greek “Parallaxis” meaning “alteration,” refers to the optical phenomenon in which an object appears to be in a different position depending on the angle it is viewed from.
“Parallax” will feature works from throughout Nicolai’s career but the exhibition is “not a retrospective,” he told artnet News during a recent studio visit.
He is creating one new work for the show, a re-calibrating of the piece Particle Noise in relation to the dimensions of one of the museum’s galleries. The work is anchored in the artist’s ongoing practice of giving audio and visual renderings to imperceptible phenomena: using a Geiger counter, receiver, and speakers, the installation “documents” the radiation flow rate of the place where it’s installed by transmitting it on an audio level.
The principle of the Parallax View is something that has been a common motif throughout Nicolai’s body of work, and is often a feature of his ground-breaking use of light and sound that create “a sensual ‘interzone‘ in perception between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation,” according to a statement from his studio.
Carsten Nicolai Fades (2006). Courtesy the artist
This exhibition will see his vision exacted throughout the Ichihara Lakeside Museum and will also feature unidisplay (2012), future past perfect pt.4 (stratus,) (2010) and fades (2006), alongside photographs from Nicolai’s series wolken (2009) and fades.
Well known in the techno and electronic music scene for his work under the pseudonym Alva Noto, Nicolai operates in the worlds of film, music, and art, and is a co-founder of the legendary German label Raster Noton.
Recently, he even scored the Oscar winning film The Revenant (2015) with Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
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