Middle Gate

Arrows is one of a series of animated films shown during Suchan Kinoshita’s first solo exhibition at the M HKA in 2002. The series explored and staged to show the porous boundaries between dream, reality and narrative. Arrows is no exception, presenting us with this sort of poetic and highly visual interplay. Before her career as an artist, Kinoshita, the child of a German mother and Japanese father, worked in the theatre as actor, director and set builder. These experiences informed her views, as an artist, on the role of the spectator as an active observer and the multiple and individual interpretation of a work of art. Kunoshita’s works of art unfold in the course of time, as dynamic processes in which the personal relationship between the spectator and the work take shape. The place and time of the presentation play an important part. As far as she is concerned, static depictions and representations of ‘something else’ are only a distraction. So the starting point here is not any complicated figuration or abstraction, but a recognisable and simple thing – an arrow. Kinoshita very deliberately focuses our attention on this everyday object in a public place, in this case a museum. The polystyrene background, which acts as a projection screen, reinforces this visual simplicity and gives the whole thing a more architectural dimension.