Shiro Takatani

Background

Shiro Takatani was born on October 15, 1963 in Nara, Japan.

Education

Shiro Takatani graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts. In 1984 Takatani co-founded the group Dumb Type with other students from different sections of the university.

Career

Shiro Takatani is one of the founders of the group Dumb Type in 1984, and has been involved especially in the visual and technical aspects. Dumb Type began touring around the world and got recognition with their multidisciplinary shows Pleasure Life (1988), and pH (1990-1995) and S/N (1992-1996)

After the death of the artistic director Teiji Furuhashi in 1995, some members left the company, while new ones joined it, as the composer Ryoji Ikeda. They continued working under Shiro Takatani's direction and created the performances OR (1997-1999), memorandum (1999-2003), Voyage (2002-2009), and the related installations OR (1997), Cascade (2000), Voyages (2002) and Memorandum or Voyage (2014).

In his solo activities, Takatani participated in a municipal project of Groningen, the Netherlands "Stadsmarkering - Groningen/Marking The City Boundaries" (master plan: Daniel Libeskind), in collaboration with Akira Asada in 1990.

Takatani also directed visual images for the collaboration concert Dangerous Visions by Art Zoyd and the National Orchestra of Lille in March 1998. He did visual direction for the Ryuichi Sakamoto's opera "Life" in September 1999. And he released solo video installation work frost frames 1998, optical flat/fiber optic type 2000 (a collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan).

Also, Takatani created the video installation "Iris" in collaboration with Fujiko Nakaya, a fog sculptor, for the Valencia Biennial in 2001. Commissioned by the Natural History Museum of Latvia in Riga, for the exhibition "Conversations with Snow and Ice", his installation was presented in November-December 2005, as part of a retrospective of the works of the snow and ice scientist Ukichiro Nakaya (1900-1962).

In 2006, under the auspices of the Japan Foundation's 2006 Australia-Japan Exchange Project "Rapt! 20 contemporary artists from Japan", the artist was selected for a one-month artist residency in Australia and exhibited the new installation Chrono in Melbourne.

In 2007, Takatani created an audio-visual installation "Life - fluid, invisible, inaudible..." in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, commissioned by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM). The DVD version of "Life - fluid, invisible, inaudible..." was released in May 2008.

Besides, Takatani traveled to the Arctic (Greenland and Iceland) by sailboat joining the arctic expedition project "Cape Farewell" in 2007, the related exhibition was held July-August 2008 at Kagakumiraikan (National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo. He created a performance "La Chambre Claire" (German title: Die Helle Kammer) through three weeks residency in Halle, Germany. The world premiere was in June 2008, as part of the "Theater der Welt" Festival in Halle.

A collaboration installation with Fujiko Nakaya titled "Cloud Forest" commissioned by YCAM was created in 2010 in Yamaguchi, Japan.

Also Takatani did visual direction for the Mallarmé Project - Igitur (direction and text reading: Moriaki Watanabe + Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto) at Kyoto Performing Arts Center in 2011.

His more recent creations include the laser installation Silence (2012), commissioned by Radar, Loughborough University Arts, the fog installation Composition (2013) for the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates and one of the first animation artworks for the 3D Water Matrix, inaugurated at the exhibition "Robotic Art" at the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie in Paris, in 2014.

In 2013, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography presented Camera lucida, a dedicated exhibition with a wide range of the video and photographic artworks, he created both as a solo artist and artistic director of Dumb Type.

Another solo exhibition, held at the Kodama Gallery in Tokyo in 2014, featured his photographic series Topograph and frost frame Europe 1987.

Takatani also created and directed three theatre/dance performances: La chambre claire (2008), referring to Roland Barthes's essay la camera lucida, Chroma (2012), inspired by Derek Jarman's Chroma: A Book of Color, with original music by Simon Fisher Turner, and ST/LL (2015) in which he is exploring how to consider the micromeasure of time and whether "art or science can ever truly express this hourglass world".

Achievements

• Shiro Takatani is an outstanding contemporary artist. Some of his installations are part of permanent collections of museums, for example Camera lucida (2004) and Toposcan/Ireland 2013 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and optical flat/fiber optic type (2000) at the National Museum of Art in Osaka.
  
  In addition, his works were presented, among others, at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Romaeuropa festival / MACRO in Rome, Royal Academy of Arts in London, Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, GREC festival in Barcelona, Festival de Otoño in Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Lille 2004 - European Capital of Culture, NTT InterCommunication Center - ICC, Tokyo, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM).
  
  Besides, Shiro Takatani received the 65th Prize of Fine Arts (Art media) from the Ministry of Education of Japan in 2015 and the Kyoto Prefecture Cultural Award in 2019.

Works

More photos

• installation

  • frost frames

    1998

  • optical flat

    2000

  • Camera lucida

    2004

  • Ice Core

    2005

  • Snow Crystal

    2005

  • Chrono

    2006

  • photo-gene

    2007

  • silence

    2012

  • IRIS

    2001

  • LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible...

    2007

  • CLOUD FOREST

    2010

  • Kichizaemon X

    2012

  • Garden Live

    2007

• performance

  • La chambre claire

    2008

  • CHROMA

    2012

  • ST/LL

    2015

  • Mallarmé Project

    2010

Connections

colleague:

Teiji Furuhashi

colleague:

Ryoji Ikeda