AOYAMA Satoru "Dedicated to Unknown Embroiderers"（TOKYO）

Mizuma Art Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of AOYAMA Satoru’s exhibition “Dedicated to Unknown Embroiderers” on April 22nd 2015. Employing industrial-use sewing machines, Aoyama presents numerous works which expand the frame of the embroidery medium, by questioning the values inherent in humanity and labour within the continuing changes effected by modernization.

For this exhibition, Aoyama’s work engages with his interest in the map works of Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), which were entitled “MAPPA” and produced by embroiderer craftspeople of Afghanistan. 

The influence of the history of the arts and crafts, of political relations which isolate East and West from one another – evoking thoughts of Orientalism, globalization, capitalism, war and disaster: by investigating the circumstances in which “MAPPA” was made, Aoyama Satoru, too, found himself compelled to create a world map.

While it is universal in its existence, it is a world map unusually filled with change.

The order of the world is greatly transformed; in this modernity in which one can see the repetitions of “disappearance and regeneration”, boundaries become indistinct, and things which one might have thought were problems in faraway lands become urgent issues close to hand. 

Boetti’s works, created by female Afghan refugees, seem even now in their unfaded state to raise important matters to our awareness. So too, in Aoyama Satoru’s works, are the light and darkness of modernization, the community and the individual, nation and society, and problems concerning many and various boundary lines, brought forcefully to our attention.