Elsewhere stop-motion animations chronical Who travelling the world to find themself (with all the hippyishness that might imply). Later collages reference Elon Musk and Grimes’s decision to raise their child gender-neutral, while Skolstreijk for Who?, a cartoonish sculpture of a ship lurching over what may be polar waves or an iceberg, with a flattened polar bear flopping over its prow and a placard displaying the slogan of the title raised mid- ships, references… well, you know. Courtesy the artist, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv & Brussels GioMARCONI, Milan Taro Nasu, Tokyo and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photo: André Carvalho and Tugba Carvalho / CHROMA. And yet while all this might suggest that Fujiwara’s character is built on clear design principles, structure and planning, it is playfully undermined by Who’s subsequent unfolding as a symptom of our unstable present, the baer taking its place in a world that is as full of befuddlement as it is of potential.Īdam Who?, 2020. And in case there was any doubt about the artificial nature of the world on display, the account proceeds with a series of collages purporting to detail Who’s invention through the diktats of a branding exercise (titled Branding Who and offering ‘three design traits your brand character must have’ – ‘instantly rings a bell’, ‘inspires trust’, ‘drives engagement’ – the play on ‘your character’ running throughout the show). An image of Who themself appears in the collage, seated, dressed only in a pair of blue jeans, reading what we might take to be a self-help book, titled Becoming Who?, and appearing at once Pooh-like and reminiscent of the bear costume deployed by Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss in videos from the early 1980s in which, channelling an artworld version of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, they too dreamed up schemes to categorise the world and its absurdities. ‘Out of what?’, then, is the question with which we begin. The journey begins with A True Account of Who the Baer (all works 2021), a structure that looks at first glance like a giant Disney fairytale book (of the type that opens Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), whose open pages are cut through to reveal a collagist’s worktable (littered with pens, scissors, notebooks, glue and a cutting mat), as if to emphasise that all ‘truths’ here are constructed. Which, depending on your outlook on such things, might be a common-sense or a naive notion of how we expect identity to function.Ī True Account of Who the Baer, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Although only the truly architecturally minded would have any chance of recognising this while wandering through them, the forms nevertheless give viewers the feeling that, despite their individual titles, we are dealing with some sort of an indivisible gesamtkunst-werke (or are trapped in a larger-than-life, ursine model of the boardgame ‘Operation’). The works on show are housed in a vaguely mazelike cardboard architecture whose outer limits trace the silhouette of the bear in question. It’s a warped take on a ‘choose your own identity’ adventure, if you like. The exhibition takes the form of a structured journey presenting Who’s invention and is shaped by a sequence of works, many of which are decorated by more-or-less-absurd survey-style ticked boxes, org charts and detourned political and marketing slogans, that playfully suggest who Who, as someone born in 2020, might be or can become.
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