We are pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Saori Miyake.
In recent years, Miyake has produced photogram works in which photographs that the artist found are hand-painted in reverse, so that the positive becomes the negative in her painting. She then developed the painted photograph again on photographic paper. The images created through this interactive process evoke multiple dimensions of the medium and a greater depth. Moreover, in the perception of Miyake, she places emphasis on the purpose of looking at images at a time when we are flooded with them in all kinds of media. This reflects her desire as an artist to find some kind of relief in the interpretation of the “pictorial image” rather than in the photograph itself.
Since two years ago, Miyakeʼs motif is a private photo collection of a gymnast who participated in the Berlin Olympic Games held in Germany before the war. At last yearʼs “21st “DOMANI: The Art of Tomorrow” Exhibition ( at The National Art Center ) she attempted to get an overview of his life from the young man who had participated in the Olympics and served in the military until the later years as an educator.
This time, Miyake will work with the pages of the album that contain photos of his visit to Potsdam during the 1936 Olympics. Next to the photos, he wrote as follows:
- Potsdam, famous for the Potsdam Declaration, is a few miles away from Berlin. In the past, the King of Germany was in the Palace which was visited by many people that came from all over the world -
This shows that the photo taken at Potsdam in 1936 was seen again in a different light after the city became known differently through the 1945 "Potsdam Declaration". It showed the change in perspective of individuals and history after the defeat of the country that was the key turning point of the era. Miyake, strongly impressed by this, went to Potsdam, the capital city of the German federal state of Brandenburg, and strolled through the vast gardens of the Palace, following the gymnastʼs footsteps, with the help of his photographs.
The exhibition will focus on new works of the photogram series "The missing shade" and the video work "Garden (Potsdam)" produced during her own fieldwork.
With these works, Miyake will develop an attempt to extract the "pictorial image" from the interrelationship between the individual and the zeitgeist, starting from the memories of an individual who relates to Potsdam.