Living Coral / 16-1546 / Market
Living Coral / 16-1546 / Shops

  • Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2019
    Living Coral / 16-1546 / Market, 2019
    Living Coral / 16-1546 / Shops, 2019
    Photo: Takeshi Hirabayashi

S06

You may notice that numberless ropes hang under the arcade across from Endoji shopping street to Endoji Honmachi shopping street. The ropes are used for hanging decorations made by local residents for their famous "Endoji Tanabata Festival", which has a history dating back more than 60 years. The artist focused on the ropes and replaced them with pink ones as a new work for the Aichi Triennale. The pink color is called "Living Coral (PANTONE 16-1546)", which has been announced as the Color of the Year 2019 by Pantone LLC, best known for its color chart. You may also notice people in town carrying shopping bags colored in the same pink. The artist asked stores in both shopping streets to replace their usual shopping bags with the ones she made with this particular pink. The bags also have drawings by the artist depicting characteristics of each store. Such approaches intend to make the audience realize things overlooked in a community by introducing a new point of view that is unique to the artist.

Ayşe ERKMEN

  • Born 1949 in Istanbul, Turkey
  • Based in Berlin, Germany
  • Photo: Serdar Tanyeli/Istanbul

Ayşe Erkmen excels in creating artwork out of simple contrivances, such as the temporary relocation of objects based on her careful interpretations of a site's hidden context. At the 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster, she immersed ocean cargo containers in an inland harbor separating the city's commercial and industrial districts, allowing visitors to cross between them by walking on the surface of the water--a chasm that would normally be impassable. At the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011, she employed pumps to draw seawater from the neighboring canal, filtering the "City of Water's" water via a series of pipes brought into the exhibition space. With its use of water purification systems developed in Germany to secure drinking water for conflict zones, the work asked its viewers to consider the relation of the interior and the exterior, seawater and purified water, disparities in technology across nations, and so on.

Selected Works & Awards

2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Münster, Germany
2016 Culture City of East Asia 2016, Nara, Art Celebration in Nara – Beyond Time and Space, Saidaiji Temple, Nara, Japan
2011 54th Venice Biennial, Pavilion of Turkey, Venice, Italy

Map

Endoji / Endoji Hommachi Shopping Arcades

Address

1&2 Nagono, Nishi-ku, Nagoya 451-0042 JAPAN

Open

12:00-20:00
(Fri-21:00)

Closed

Mondays (Except for National Holidays)

Access

・7 minutes on foot from Marunouchi Station on the Sakura-dori Subway Line or Tsurumai Subway Line.
・9 minutes on foot from Kokusai Center Station on the Sakura-dori Subway Line.
・8 minutes on foot from Nagoya Station.

Inquiries

+81-52-971-6111