sachi miyachi
mining future project
17 November 2019 - 21 December 2019
opening Sunday 17 November 16.00 – 18.00 hrs
The Transformation Series is a triptych of consecutive solo exhibitions exploring crossovers between visual art and architecture. The artists Hili Greenfeld (Israel), Sachi Miyachi (Japan) and Paul Devens (Netherlands) have been invited to carry out artistic research into the location, architecture and social history of Bradwolff Projects, to subsequently transform this characteristic space. The research practices of all three artists play with the boundaries of the space, the ways in which they are crossed and how the visitor is invited in.
Sachi Miyachi – Mining Future Project
Sachi Miyachi is the second artist in The Transformation Series at Bradwolff Projects. As an installation and performance artist, Miyachi focuses on researching everyday spaces. The space of what is now Bradwolff Projects was once part of the surgery building of the former Citizen’s Hospital in Amsterdam East. Since it was built in 1891, its social purpose and function and its role in society have changed: transforming from a hospital into a project space.
For ‘Mining Future Projects’ Sachi Miyachi has interpreted the walls of Bradwolff Projects as her physical and artistic object. For Miyachi, the walls of the space make up a layered collection of memories, a physical reflection of accumulated activities and transformations, of ideas and approaches. She journeys back through the history of the space by exposing the layers applied to the walls over time. With the exhibition walls functioning here as the physical and artistic canvas, Miyachi sands down their layers and hoovers up the dust, extracting the dust as source material for future artworks while simultaneously allowing the original walls to exhale. The spatial installation illustrates another aspect of this journey through time. The installation is composed out of the collection ‘backstage standby objects’ of Bradwolff Projects, such as pedestals, props and movable walls, which are partly kept in stock behind the exhibition space. In the installation she thus combines visible and invisible parts of the history of Bradwolff.
Miyachi has been researching her immediate surroundings, everyday rituals and actions for years, and does so by interacting with visitors. She uses spatial forms and the location to include her visitors in her shifting perspectives. In an earlier project Hair Washer District [2012] at Bradwolff Projects, Miyachi created a space-filling installation in which she invited visitors to participate. By taking a seat in the salon, visitors experienced the ritual acts of hair washing. Thus providing visitors with a different experience of both the space and this everyday activity.
Sachi Miyachi [Tokyo, Japan, 1978] studied Art and Anthropology at the Wako University in Tokyo. She then came to the Netherlands to study Art at the Rietveld and Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She has won several prizes: the AIAS Prize of Honour in 2008, awarded by the Alliance of Independent Art Schools, the Great KiK Prize in 2012, and the Theodora Niemeijer Prize in 2014. Miyachi has exhibited internationally. And only recently in 2019, she exhibited at the Sculpture Biennial ARTZUID; It Happens Anyway at W139; and completed a residency of Beautiful Distress/Vijfde Seizoen in Japan.