2012 | Special Exhibitions

7 November, 2011 - 3 February, 2012

Closed for renovation [Detail]

Genichiro Inokuma Words from within a Hand - Artworks on Paper

4 February 2012 - 4 March 2012

As a result of a career spanning 70 years, Genichiro Inokuma (1902-1993) left the world a great many artworks. More than 20,000 are in the collection of Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art. Over 90 percent of those works are executed on paper.
This exhibition presents Genichiro Inokuma works of all sizes, large and small, executed on art paper, in sketchbooks, and even on memo paper, many of them publicly displayed for the first time. All are “painter’s words” revealing the charm and expressive power of Inokuma’s art. [Detail]

Beautiful Noise, 1980
©The MIMOCA Foundation

Chiharu Shiota―Where Are We Going?

18 March 2012 - 1 July 2012

An exhibition devoted to Chiharu Shiota, an artist of rapidly growing reputation based in Berlin. Shiota embodies in art the memories we impart to objects and places, our sense of a presence made stronger by absence, and the anxieties and fears we encounter in daily life. The artworks she creates, as a result of discerning such feelings and emotions in her own being, transcend her own thoughts and powerfully affect the viewer.

The exhibition will present works concerned with “walls,” a theme Shiota has embarked on in recent years. The works arise from her experience of living in Germany far from Japan and her thoughts of how nationality, religion and other categories assigned to individuals are helpful aids for knowing others and ourselves and, simultaneously, unsurpassable walls preventing us from really knowing each other. The featured artworks will also include a boat installation prompted by her experience of the Setouchi region where this museum is located and a video work produced on the basis of interviews with children in Berlin. The exhibition will ask: Where did I come from? What is my existence now and where am I going? [Detail]

Dialogue with absence, 2012
installation view at MIMOCA
©Chiharu Shiota
photo by Sunhi Mang

Takashi Homma: New Documentary

15 July 2012 - 23 September 2012

This is the first solo art museum exhibition in Japan for Takashi Homma, who engages in photography from a neutral position without letting himself be bound by genre or methods of display. The exhibition is now making its third stop, having previously traveled to Kanazawa and Tokyo in 2011. Interweaving photographic prints with works of varying media—books, paintings, video, and photo-based silk screens, as well as an entirely new installation, this time—the exhibition demonstrates how Homma’s photographs commute between expression and documentation. Viewers are made to wonder, “What is a photograph?” in an exhibition that inquires into the essence of “seeing.” [Detail]

1. from the series, Tokyo and My Daughter 2006
©Takashi Homma

Butsu Butsu

15 July 2012 - 23 September 2012

Genichiro Inokuma (1902-93) was something of a collector as an artist. He collected things he felt to be beautiful or cute, whether waste objects discarded in the street or expensive antiques, in a natural way in day-to-day life.
His collection of “things” (butsu butsu) is now in the safekeeping of this museum. From that collection, stylist Miyoko Okao has selected certain items catching her interest, and photographer Takashi Homma has photographed them. This exhibition, then, is the result of their selecting and photographing objects in close collaboration, “muttering” (butsu butsu) together all the while. [Detail]

Installation view of "Butsu Butsu" at MIMOCA
Photo: Manami Takahashi

Ishiuchi Miyako SILKEN DREAMS

7 October 2012 - 6 January 2013

Photographer Ishiuchi Miyako has worked with tireless passion, ever since winning the Kimura Ihei Award for new photographers in 1979. In 2005, Ishiuchi represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with “Mother’s,” a series of photographs of her late mother’s belongings. She thereafter embarked on the series “hiroshima,” for which she photographed one-piece dresses and other personal articles of victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In the process, she had contact with a great many silk garments—an experience that awoke her interest in silk. Then, because Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, her home city until the age of six, is a famous textile production region, she in 2010 took “silk” as a theme and began photographing meisen silk weave fabric, silkworm cocoons, silk mills, and weaving mills. [Detail]

Past Special Exhibitions