Birth of Comedy

	Birth of Comedy
	testsite 14.2 Meiro Koizumi & Yasufumi Nakamori
	Off-Site Fusebox Festival Performance: Friday, April 25, 6pm at the Blanton Museum of Art Auditorium Opening Reception: Sunday, April 27, 4-6pm with a conversation with the Artist & Curator at 4:30pm
	testsite | 502 West 33rd Street | Austin, TX 78705
	Fluent~Collaborative & testsite are pleased to present Birth of Comedy, an installation of video work by Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi. Curated by Yasufumi Nakamori, this will be Mr. Koizumi's first exhibition in the state of Texas and third solo exhibition in the United States. In conjunction with the installation at testsite, Mr. Koizumi will perform his workAutopsychobabble #5 at the Blanton Museum of Art auditorium on April 25th as part of the 10th Annual Fusebox Festival. The Fusebox Festival performance is co-organized by testsite and the Blanton Museum of Art. The presentation at testsite will feature video works from the past decade, including Human Opera XXX (2007), Portrait of a Young Samurai (2009), and Inder Kommen Sie/It's a Comedy(2012). The artist and curator will engage in a moderated discussion during the opening event at testsite on Sunday, April 27th. In his video installations and performances, Meiro Koizumi deals with psychological and political dynamics on a scale from the familial to the national, and examines questions of affect, perception, and memory, often touching upon aspects of Japan's modern history. Implicating himself and his performers in his art, Koizumi challenges the viewer by re-defining the uncomfortable and indefinable line between cruelty and comedy through his choreographed emotional manipulations. _________________________________________ Meiro Koizumi is a video and performance artist working in Yokohama, Japan (born in Gunma, Japan, 1976). He studied at the International Christian University, Tokyo (1996–1999); Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1999–2002) and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2005–2006), and won first prize at Beck's Futures 2 in London for student film and video (2001). His solo exhibitions and performances have been featured at MoMA, New York (2013); Tate Modern, London (2013); Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2012); Art Space, Sydney (2011); and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, includingFuture Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2012);Art Scope 2009–2011: Invisible Memories at the Hara Museum, Tokyo (2011); Liverpool Biennial (2010); Media City Seoul (2010); Aichi Triennale, Japan (2010); and Nanjing Triennial, China (2008). For more information, please see the artist's website: www.meirokoizumi.com. Yasufumi Nakamori, PhD, is an associate curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and teaches modern and contemporary Japanese art and architecture at Hunter College, the City University of New York. As an expert on the interdisciplinary field of the photography and architecture of twentieth-century Japan, he has recently authored scholarly essays, including "Criticism of Expo '70 in Print: Journals Ken, Dezain Hihyō, and Bijutsu Techō" in Josai University Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 23, 2012 (a special issue on Expo '70 and Japanese Art), and "Kawazoe Noboru – Shinkenchiku and Tradition Debate" inMetabolism: the City of Future (Mori Art Museum, 2011). In 2011, Nakamori won an Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award from the College Art Association for his book Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010). _________________________________________ Support: This project is supported in part by the Japan Foundation New York Grants for Arts and Culture. Special thanks to the Blanton Museum of Art and the Fusebox Festival for their generous collaboration with the performance. Off-Site Performance: Friday, April 25, 6pm at the Blanton Museum of Art Auditorium (in the Smith building). Free tickets at the door. Parking in the garage at MLK and Brazos.
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