The Garden of Forking Paths brings together for the first time the distinctive practices of Melbourne-based artist Mira Gojak and Tokyo-based artist Takehito Koganezawa. This is the first in an annual series of international exhibitions at Buxton Contemporary that seek to provide global context to contemporary Australian art.
The exhibition finds points of connection and divergence in the work of these two renowned artists, with large scale installations and more intimate works connecting their practices across both floors of the museum.
The Garden of Forking Paths takes its name from the modernist Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ intricate and magical short story from 1941. Part philosophy, part science fiction and part riddle, Borges’ story is a richly multidimensional text that conjures co-existent but dynamically shifting realms of time and space.
The exhibition similarly traces two very different timeframes, durations and approaches to making. Australian artist Mira Gojak presents new work alongside drawings, sculptures, installations and photographs spanning more than twenty years, while the practice of her Japanese counterpart Takehito Koganezawa is represented by specially-made performative video drawings and new improvisational works with a sampling of earlier works on paper.
Curators Shihoko Iida and Melissa Keys say “Both artists lyrically register the fluid instabilities of existence and consciousness—shifting gravities interspersed with moments of weightlessness, the flux and passage of time, and the very elemental processes of growth, entropy and decay. Observing the affinities, differences, overlapping and divergent impulses that link and separate Gojak and Koganezawa’s work, The Garden of Forking Paths seeks to enter into the evocative, multiple parallel possibilities, realities and territories that they each poetically create”.
The Garden of Forking Paths opens on Wednesday 7 November 2018 until Sunday 17 February 2019 at Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, Southbank.
The exhibition is curated by Shihoko Iida, Chief Curator of the Aichi Triennale 2019 and Melissa Keys, Curator of Buxton Contemporary in collaboration with the artists.
Mira Gojak lives and works in Melbourne. She studied Science, Psychology and Zoology at the University of Adelaide, before completing a Bachelor of Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1992. Mira has held numerous solo and group exhibitions across Australia. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, as well as the Monash University Collection, and she is represented by Murray White Room, Melbourne.
Takehito Koganezawa lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. He has exhibited extensively across Asia, Europe and North America and works with video, drawing, installation and performance—treating each as an equal means of expression. Takehito’s practice is represented in museum, private and corporate collections internationally including in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All of his works share a poetic approach to everyday occurrences and observation, an engagement with the issues of time and the void, as well as an underlying musicality.
Koganezawa is currently in Melbourne to make work for the exhibition.
Located at the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts, Buxton Contemporary is a major new art museum that draws upon the Michael Buxton Collection as a springboard for exhibitions, events, research, publishing and ideas. Open to the public and free.
The Garden of Forking Paths, Wednesday 7 November until Sunday 17 February 2019 at Buxton Contemporary, Cnr Dodds St & Southbank Blvd, Southbank. Entry Free. Wed – Sun 11am – 5pm; Thur 11am – 8pm. https://buxtoncontemporary.com/
