\nTakahiko and Akiko Iimura’s Farewell Party<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
Microscope invites you to a Farewell Party at the gallery this Sunday November 19, 6-9pm for Takahiko and Akiko Iimura, who will be returning to Japan this month after residing in New York since the 1960s. <\/span><\/p>\n The gallery has been working with Takahiko, a pioneering Japanese film and video artist, since its inaugural exhibition in September of 2010. We were also very fortunate to have been able to present a solo night of rare 16mm films by Akiko Iimura several years ago as part of the gallery\u2019s event series.<\/span><\/p>\n Besides artists we work with, we consider Taka and Akiko not only our friends, but part of a family of artists that oceans cannot possibly separate.<\/span><\/p>\n Films and videos will be projected throughout the event. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n “Although Taka was an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema’s minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else” – Jonas Mekas<\/span><\/p>\n I was not that conscious about “being born in Japan” so “decisively”. I think it is the result of my own choices, but I do feel that I have “explored the possibilities without compromising”. When it seems to me that I have carried out this exploration sufficiently, I am aware of having changed my choice (the style of the work). However, this is not because I have lost interest in a certain possibility, and I want to continue exploring it some other time in a different way. Just as my interest in imagism in the sixties appeared in a different form in my landscape videos of the eighties, my conceptualism of the seventies may reappear in a different form in the nineties. However, whether Tokyo will be an appropriate place to present this work is still an unknown. I think that even here I must make my work for an international audience. But can I be an “enigmatic, mysterious figure” in Tokyo?\u00a0– Takahiko Iimura<\/span><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n _<\/span> Akiko Iimura<\/strong>\u00a0was born in Tokyo, Japan and has lived in New York since the mid-60s. She appeared in several early films of her husband Takahiko Iimura and in the 1970s and 1980s made two 16mm films herself\u00a0featuring original soundtracks by Belgium composer\u00a0Jacques Bekaert.\u00a0She has also been an editor, writer and sometimes photographer for various Japanese publications for many years. She was also the translator for the Japanese editions of\u00a0 \u201cMovie Journal\u201d and \u201cI Had Nowhere to Go\u201d by Jonas Mekas. In recent years, Akiko Iimura has been an essayist for the Japanese community paper in New York.<\/span><\/p>\n Sunday November 19, 6-9pm Takahiko and Akiko Iimura’s Farewell Party From “I Love You”, 1973, single-channel video, 5 minutes – Image courtesy of the artist Microscope invites you to a Farewell Party at the gallery this Sunday November 19, 6-9pm for Takahiko and Akiko Iimura, who will be returning to Japan this month after residing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_mc_calendar":[],"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-20252","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20252"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20273,"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20252\/revisions\/20273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Taka](\"http:\/\/www.microscopegallery.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Taka-and-Akiko-Iimura_s.jpg\")
\nFrom “I Love You”, 1973, single-channel video, 5 minutes – Image courtesy of the artist<\/span><\/em>
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\nTakahiko Iimura<\/strong>, born in Tokyo in 1937, is a pioneering artist\u00a0known for his work with\u00a0\u00a0film, video, installation, performance,\u00a0and digital technologies spanning more than 50 years. Iimura\u00a0first\u00a0began working with film in 1960\u00a0and was instrumental in the burgeoning Japanese experimental and independent film scene. Iimura moved to the US on a Fellowship from Harvard University in 1966 and soon immersed himself in the mid-60s New York\u00a0experimental film and art community. Early videos were included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art of New York and PS1 (1975), and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France (1977), while other performance based works and interactive installations were featured in the 1979 two-person exhibition \u201cNew Video\u201d (with Shigeko Kubota) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Among the institutions that have exhibited Iimura\u2019s works are Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY;\u00a0Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY;\u00a0Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY;\u00a0Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY;\u00a0Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY;\u00a0Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Pacific Film Archive, Berkley, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MI; Carnegie Art Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise, Paris, France; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; Tate Modern, London, UK; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; among others. Iimura\u2019s work is in the Collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy;\u00a0 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.\u00a0Upcoming exhibitions include: \u201cBefore Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995\u201d at MIT List Gallery, Cambridge, MA opening in February 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n
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\nWith the underwriting support of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation<\/em><\/span><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"