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Megumi Matsubara, architecte de l’air

CHAHRAZAD ZAHI « Avec soulagement, avec humiliation, avec terreur, il comprit qu’il était lui aussi une apparence, qu’un autre était en train de le rêver. »   Jorge Luis Borges, Les ruines circulaires. Artiste « totale » à l’œuvre protéiforme, Megumi Matsubara est une poétesse devenue artiste qui fait de l’architecture. Hybridant les cultures et les media, son travail embrasse la dualité entre la présence et l’absence, le définissable et le hasard, le monumental et la légèreté. Au gré de ses pérégrinations, c’est une vision singulière de l’instant, du déplacement, de l’espace, du temps, de l’« ici et maintenant » qu’elle propose. Une artiste autobiographique Megumi accompagne chaque série de récits… Continue reading →

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Undress

Dec 2014 MEGUMI MATSUBARA   Undress           “I am already naked. What else can I remove?” Once, I attended a cicada break its shell. I stayed up all night to be present—I was eight. It was summer, in the silence of dawn, blue light. The cicada started knocking its body, from within. Blinks perplexed me. Every time I blinked, it pared itself. The new body exposed—white, glittering, so new it was wet, so naked, almost invisible. Its transparent wings reflected the blue. When it fully came out of itself, it stood on the top of its empty self. Its volume was in two—void and lightness. The… Continue reading →

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WALK STRAIGHT

WALK STRAIGHT Solo Show by Megumi Matsubara Voice Gallery Marrakech 31 May – 30 Sep 2014 (extended through 25 Oct 2014) Text and conversation with the artist by Maria Giovanna Mancini > Texte et conversation en française > Testo e conversazione in Italiano The Japanese artist presents a complex project composed of two different works: the first nucleus is disposed along the vertical visual axis the spectator encounters entering the gallery; the second part is represented by the video installation present in the environment that is oriented on the axis ideally orthogonal to the first. The two different installations intersect intensifying references and gazes and interlocking the different points of… Continue reading →

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Enter Me Carefully

February 2014 MEGUMI MATSUBARA               Close your eyes.             Enter me carefully.             And witness; all flowers are naked.   I was three. My mother was in front of me putting me to sleep. I was not sleepy. I was lying looking at her face. After a while, she closed her eyes. Soon she fell asleep. She was tired. I could not see her eyes anymore. I watched her face for a long time. Quickly I became afraid. I thought if she never opened her eyes, we would never see each other again. Sleep and death seemed… Continue reading →

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Blindness & Dreams

17 Mar 2013, Lecture To the people at March Meeting 2013, during the Sharjah Art Biennale 11, Sharjah, UAE MEGUMI MATSUBARA When you close your eyes, what do you see? Eyes are the window to the soul. When you shut your eyes, you stop seeing things outside and only see the interior of your soul. In that world, knowledge and truth come from inside you. But how can we communicate in the darkness? My work is to create a blank space – where your presence becomes very important, to create intimacy. This intimacy makes you care about things that only you can see. Space has nothing to do with physical… Continue reading →

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Statement — Towards Another Awareness of Space

February 2011 MEGUMI MATSUBARA I’ve chosen experiential space as my medium. The space where architecture and art meet, where the borders between the two cease to be an issue. My approach is an attempt to reveal a different awareness of spatiality; to explore, through a collection of ephemeral experiences, the other side of the pleats that is always hidden, the mechanisms of a secretive world . To begin with, I don’t see the borders between visible/invisible, heard/unheard, countable/uncountable. Important to the process of my work, is not the drawing of a line between ‘whether’ or ‘not’, but the search for a balance between two seemingly opposite phenomena. When I succeed… Continue reading →

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Architecture Driven by Stories

Kime to Kehai – Texture and Sense Artists: Anni LEPPÄLÄ, Assistant [MATSUBARA Megumi + ARIYAMA Hiroi], NOMURA Makoto, HOKI Nobuya Curators: KONDO Yuki, HATTORI Hiroyuki (ACAC) Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC), Aomori, Japan July 28 – September 17, 2012  HIROYUKI HATTORI There are types of architecture for which associated narratives rather than their designs are critical to the determination of their value. Now in its final stages of construction, the work House of 33 Years [fig.1] by Assistant, the architecture studio formed by ARIYAMA Hiroi and MATSUBARA Megumi, is also a piece of architecture of that kind, accompanied by countless fascinating stories. Those stories are not necessarily created intentionally by the architect’s hand, but rather,… Continue reading →

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The Stranger In Marrakech

Void/Between Higher Atlas, 4th Marrakech Biennale curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman March 1 – June 3, 2012 SATOKO SHIBAHARA “Void/Between”, the title of an essay first published in 2011 by artist Megumi Matsubara is also the rubric of her recent intervention, a site-specific installation at Higher Atlas, 4th Marrakech Biennale 2012. In the essay originally published in Japanese,  空／間, Matsubara proposes several transliterations for the Japanese word  空間 , read kuukan, meaning Space. The title uses an unnatural syntax, a slash separating the characters ‘kuu’ from ‘kan’. With this radical gesture, she quakes our casual and even usual understanding of Space. Her transliterations to English such as “void/space,” “empty/between” and “void/gap” magnifying these… Continue reading →

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