Shinro Ohtake Scrapbooks, 1977 - Ongoing
The engine of Shinro Ohtakeâs practice is an ongoing project begun in 1977, the Scrapbooks. Ohtake has made 68 unique books to date, ranging in length from 50 to 882 pages. He works on each book for several months to over a year, pasting found imagery and materials into fragmentary compositions on each page, then adding hand-drawn and painted elements. Incorporating newsprint, magazine cutouts, product packaging, found photographs, reproductions of artworks, film strips, ticket stubs, vinyl records, and other items, the Scrapbooks are generated by an additive, constructive logic, taking on sculptural properties. At the same time, the physical mechanism of turning their pages to both view and activate their contents establishes parallels between the Scrapbooks and cinema. These are atlases of our contemporary world, charting not just how we encounter the information that circulates incessantly around us in our daily lives, but also how the remnants of empire and forces of neoliberal trade and consumption structure, facilitate, and determine those encounters. The Scrapbooks establish a visual language that Ohtake applies to projects such as âTime Memoryâ (2010â ), comprising abstract compositions made of the unsolicited mail and packaging that arrives daily to Ohtakeâs home, and multimedia installations such as Retinamnesia Filtration Shed (2014), made for the Yokohama Triennale. Similarly, Ohtake sees his approach to noise music and the sound elements in his multimedia installations as a collage-based process. Complete presentations of the Scrapbooks have been shown at the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, â10,000 Livesâ; the 2013 Venice Biennale, âEncyclopedic Palaceâ; and 2016âs âThe Keeperâ at the New Museum, New York.
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