KEI TAKEMURA

May I enter? Kei Takemura Opening Friday, September 22nd, 2006 6:00 pm September 23 - November 4, 2006 In her second solo exhibition Kei Takemura presents works largely created in the gallery when it was closed for the month of August. Through these works the Japanese artists offers insights into her intimate personal life. With the immediacy of a journal her works reveal dreams and situations to the viewer that have been significant to her. One sculptural work represents a dream repeatedly experienced by the artist, in which a tumbling box chases her and tries to capture her as she, terrified, attempts to escape. Eventually the box does catch her, and it sweeps her as it continues on its path. On an eleven-meter long wall Kei Takemura is showing a wall piece that consists of drawings on transparent paper and silk embroidery on thin fabric that have been layered on top of one another. The work deals with the first Berlin apartment that she saw from the inside and that belonged to her neighbors. Here, personal encounters with this family, foreign aspects of Germany and familiar situations from Japan are processed in this new work made from compounded layers that still allow her apartment in Japan to show through underneath. When she found out that it was a Serbian family that had given her entry into their apartment, she was surprised. What she had originally understood as typically German had to be reexamined. Observations, memories, experiences and encounters are the resources from which Kei Takemura distills her ideas and motifs for her labor-intensive works. Preserving moments and memory through the costly material of silk and the meditative act of embroidering gauze serves as a quiet protest against a fast flood of information and a neglect of long-term memory. In dialogue with her own recollections she allows the images to come to life again and develops them in a literally drawn-out process. Additional works by Kei Takemura will be on view at Preview Berlin - The Emerging Art Fair - from Sept. 29 - Oct. 3, 2006 at our booth (1.05).