Actions 2020 part one
Heavy Hurdles
Video Installation
Actions 2020, Part One, Heavy Hurdles, performance/video, 41min
I created this video in 2020 and exhibited it in the Koganecho Bazaar of the same year. It was inspired by the laborious task of having to move all of my belongings from my studio at the time to a new apartment.
As the apartment was close by, the whole moving process was completed by walking and transporting everything on the street. It was also during the early, uncertain phase of the isolating Corona virus pandemic, with a state of emergency being called across many cities in Japan. I felt that my actions, moving all manner of unique and strange items, accumulated through my artistic practice become a kind of street art performance in itself that I tried to capture by video.
This particular work portrays a jumble of painted wooden timber which I had used in a participatory installation featuring hurdles. The hurdles were a reference to my youth training in Australia as a hurdler, as well as thinking in relation to the upcoming summer Olympic games which were cancelled all of a sudden in 2020 to be rescheduled the following year.
In this case, rather than clearing over them, the hurdles needed to be pushed through the street, along with an array of other boxes and items. The repetitive struggle one windy morning continues for the whole duration of the video, moving across the varying
Koganecho, streetscape.