Conceived in close collaboration with Shimabuku as an extension of his exhibition The 165-metre Mermaid and Other Stories at Villa Paloma in 2021, this new publication tells of the poetic actions conducted during his travels, between his native Japan and Monaco via Brazil, Australia, and many other lands.
The artist's texts form the narrative thread of a subsequent ensemble of installations, films, sculptures and photographs made over the last thirty years. Three essays never published before have been written for the occasion by art critics and curators
Nicolas Bourriaud, and Claire Le Restif as well artist
Rirkrit Tiravanija.
As an introduction, Célia Bernasconi, curator of the exhibition, traces Shimabuku's artistic adventures through a logbook, therefore, confronting the epidemic context. Through the logbook, she reviews productions made by Shimabuku in Monaco in 2021, amongst which the totemic work Erectis featured on the cover of the book.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at NMNM-Villa Paloma, Monaco, in 2021.
Shimabuku (born 1969 in Kobe) is an artist who travels the world in search of unusual encounters. Reconnecting with a transgressive
Situationist aesthetic, he studied in Osaka and San Francisco before journeying through port cities worldwide, in Japan, Brazil, France, the Netherlands and the US. Shimabuku experiments with a range of possible interactions with the living world, pushing at its physical and imagined boundaries. His works create the conditions for poetic scenarios, documenting their genesis and material production. His performative, sometimes absurd or whimsical interventions refresh our perspective on the contemporary scene, which his works often seek to turn quite literally upside-down.
