Kota Ezawa Artist Talk
Goethe-Institut Toronto Community Space presents the opening reception of Kota Ezawa’s Mobilizing Conscience: Art + Protest, curated by Jutta BrendemĂĽhl, which will feature a virtual artist talk and Q&A.
Register here via Eventbrite
The exhibition of two video works by German artist Kota Ezawa traces the legacies and divergences of “photographs as instruments of protest,” “the representation of pain and suffering” (Susan Sontag), and “beating the establishment at their own games” (John Lennon) through art, popular culture, and spectacle. Exploring the appropriation and mediation of current events and images, Ezawa’s work reduces complex visual information to its essential elements, questioning the photographic record’s validity as a mediator of experience, and confronting the viewer with the historic and cultural distance between themselves and the figures who feature prominently in public memory.
Presented by the Goethe-Institut in partnership with the Japan Foundation and CONTACT
Kota Ezawa, born 1969 in Cologne, is a German-Japanese artist and Professor of Film and Fine Arts at California College of the Arts. Ezawa studied at Art Academy Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik and holds an MFA from Stanford University. He has had solo shows at Hayward Gallery Projects Space, London, and at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Ezawa was a resident at Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa, Japan, and his work is held in collections including MoMA and the Musée D’Art Contemporain de Montréal. Monographs include The Crime of Art and The History of Photography Remix.