TalkMonday 13 October 2014
6:00pm – 8:00pm
The Art of Soup- A Taste of Fukushima
Drinks reception from 7:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace (Outer Circle), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Ei Arakawa started the UNITED BROTHERS art collective with his brother Tomoo Arakawa in 2011. Their purpose is a mediation between the reality of Fukushima (where they were born) and the reality of the international art world at large. UNITED BROTHERS created the Green Tea Gallery, and is participating in the new Live Section of this year’s Frieze Art Fair with their new work Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? Arakawa discussed this new performance of giving away soup containing an ingredient grown in Fukushima.
“The gift of food represents the essence of hospitality, sharing and humanity. However, the soup UNITED BROTHERS offer is laced with the (conceptual) possibility that it may be radioactive. Although the ingredients used in its preparation are approved by the Japanese Farmers’ Association, and the artists assure us that the soup is safe (their mother has prepared and eaten it), it still poses a theoretical threat. By tying the work to family and presenting it in a gallery or at an art fair as a gift, UNITED BROTHERS lend the ecological disaster an ethical dimension and an aesthetic quality that also comments on the status of art as a commodity.” (Quote from Ellen Mara De Wachter in this year’s Frieze Catalogue).
About the contributors
Ei Arakawa
Ei Arakawa is a performance artist based in New York since 1998. Since he almost always works collaboratively, Ei Arakawa’s work “not only destabilises the line between one artist and another, or between one’s own name and those of others; on a more fundamental level, it disturbs the separation between director and actor, between initiator and fellow traveller.” Selected performances and exhibitions: Gwangju Bienniale, Gwangju, South Korea (2014); Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013); Pavilion of Georgia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2013); Tate Modern, London (2012); 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2011); Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2009); Yokohama Triennale, Kanagawa (2008).