Hinterland - Hiraki Sawa & Tetsuya Umeda

About

HIRAKI SAWA
SAWA is best known for video installations which present intimate observations of familiar surroundings. Trees growing from a table, or a clock suddenly endowed with legs are natural interventions made by SAWA, yet extraordinary and unpredictable for the audience. His use of animation, sharp attention to lighting, and meticulously composed shots, are amalgamated into layered works of contrasting scales. He has the ability to manipulate his imagination into a position that sits between the parallel languages of sculpture and film.  He increasingly adds more refined themes to his practice. Among them are the trickery and gifts of memory, the way time can pass at different speeds, the collaging of scale, and the tightly woven relationship between objects and emotional cues.

TETSUYA UMEDA
UMEDA’S sound performance based works are interactive, enigmatic and highly experimental. He uses his own originally produced implements, exploring rewired electricity, unpredictable sounds and atmospheric transformations.
He draws ideas for his work from the environment and circumstances surrounding the exhibition space. Spaces that at first glance seem to be nothing special, can turn out to have countless characteristics, found in the space above a ceiling or the space behind a wall - or in the position of lighting system and its structure, the material of the wall, and construction of the building, etc. He works in spaces not normally used for exhibition and makes use of found objects like daily tools and waste scraps in elaborate systems of cause and effect relationships. Powered by gravity, wind, centrifugal force or falling objects UMEDAʼs work keeps the situation unstable and unpredictable.