Dear Mother, is a research project and film based on the personal letters from the Elsewhere museum’s archive room located on the third floor. During her two week residency, Dai developed this project using the letters received by original store proprietress Sylvia Gray from the 1950s-1980s as her source text, including letters from her three children and other relatives, sympathy cards after her husband passed away in 1955, and business related documents. Dear Mother, reconstructs Sylvia’s image through these letters, other people’s words, and the artist’s imagination.
Filling a three-floor building with mundane objects her husband passed away, Dai reimagines the widowed mother and documents her daily mundane tasks— this time Sylvia’s living in the store. The lack of the protagonist’s voice despite her constant presence contrasts the voices of her children reading their own letters. The film features the voices of Sylvia’s son Sidney and her grandson Brandon; other grandchildren were also invited to be part of the film.
Periodically, the black and white pictures transform into colored portrait shots of the building’s interior to also preserve Elsewhere’s current image and document details for future reference. At the end of the film, Dai includes an interview with Sidney and Brandon Gray recalling their memories of the building and their beloved matriarch.
Project In Response To: The Records Room, an Active Archive at the Elsewhere Museum
Still from Dear Mother, 2019, 18 mins 58 secs.
Exhibitions
Collection of Recollection
Feb 7 - 13, 2020
Yotsuya Unconfirmed Studio, Tokyo, Japan
Curated by actica ( Haruko Sasakawa and Kumiko Kato)
In Tokyo, who is standing at the milestone of the new era with the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020, we will organize an exhibition with a theme of looking back on past events and tracking down their traces. Inviting both domestic and international artists, regardless of nationalities, genders and ages, we will “collect” past events, including themes and topics based on the history of a specific place or personal experience of each artist. The project will consist of video works by the artists who explore various stories/incidents ranging from individual to large scale and conduct researches, facing the past through their artworks. This exhibition is expected to be a great opportunity to collect “recollections=memories” and explore the history of people of different values beyond geographical differences. It also aims to create a collected record for future generations in order to build a cross-border network of archives.
Participating artists: Alison Nguyen, Ding-Yeh Wang, Eginhartz Kanter, Furen Dai, Haruko Sasakawa, Katherine Grazie, Masenya OriginalOne, Mikhail Basov, Natalia Basova,Minha Lee, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Pied La Biche, Roya Eshraghi
Publication / Reviews
Collection of Recollections
Exhibition Catalogue, 2021
Artist: Alison Nguyen, Ding-Yeh Wang, Eginhartz Kanter, Furen Dai, Haruko Sasakawa, Katharina Grazie, Masenya Fiesta, Mikhail Basov, Natalia Basora, Minha Lee, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Pied la Biche, Roya Eshraghi
Exhibition Date: 2020.02.07 - 02.13
Venue: Yotsuya Unconfirmed Studio
Organizer: actica
Summary of the project
Tokyo is standing at the milestone of a new era with the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020. Anticipating the great waves of time washing over Japan, we call for artists to join our project to collect small recollections to prevent them from being swept away by the great current of change. This show will be a landmark event featuring video works by responding international contemporary artists from all over the world.
About 50 years have passed since the birth of Japanese portable video camera in the late 1960s, during which the product became a tool to represent/express personal identity, and we take this occasion as an opportunity to select works that should be showcased in Tokyo, to look back at past events and their light and dark sides to reveal relationships among the countries.
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