++++ There has been many an artist who has struggled with the subject of time. Takehito Koganezawa approaches it unself-consciously and without allowing himself to be impressed too much by the ballast of art history. The Japanese artist who lives in Berlin mostly integrates actions into performances and documents them by means of video. The medium enables him to leverage real time and to create a time which so to speak stands outside time.
Thus, for instance, he asks visitors to an exhibition to enter the gallery room backwards, to take away various objects, to leave them there, to save them and to exchange them. The video which shows the process is then shown backwards. We see people moving forward uncertainly in a room full of objects which is gradually emptied. What was the beginning is now the end. A backward movement mutates into a jerky forward movement.
Koganezawa's contribution to Manifesta too was a performance in the first three days after the opening and is now its video record in the midst of the requisites that were presented. In the former washroom at Frankensteiner Hof there were three persons in identical masks and white uniforms. The person standing closest to the camera was almost completely immobile and the others walked around slowly. There were 24 alarm clocks hidden in the room which started ringing at different times. As soon as the ringing started, the two actors in the background looked for the source of the noise. The one who found the alarm clock turned it off and took the place of the immobile person in the foreground. This actor then went to the back, opened the door of a shower cabin and relieved a further masked person waiting there who in turn went back to the washroom to play along with the game of ringing alarm clocks.
Viewers were able to see parts of this happening through small holes drilled into the timber wall. The 30-minute video which is now presented in the middle of the washroom with the remains of the peep-hole wall and the clothing and masks of the actors in one of the shower cabins, however, makes much more sense. The cyclical procedure becomes more understandable; emptiness and boredom reach an absurd tension.
Frankensteiner Hof, until 25 August. jdv