Arakawa-ku
Claudia Larcher
2013
Artist Statement
Arakawa-ku is the name of a district in Tokyo, an area where Claudia Larcher was working and living for six months. Many little single family dwellings— built close together on tiny plots—line up in strange architectural forms, with only a few centimetres of interspace. In the photo series of the same name Claudia Larcher isolates single buildings and thus exposes their individual and often strange looking shapes. The connecting formal element in this set of photographs of different formats is only the horizontal line not a horizon but an anchor for our gaze.
Arakawa-ku is a photographic documentation of anonymous architecture that doesn't last longer than 40 years. In several years these photographs will be a memory to a recent past.
Artist Bio
Claudia Larcher is a visual artist with a focus in (site specific) video animation, collage, photography and installation. From 2001 to 2008 she studied « Media Art and Sculpture » at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2005 she has participated in various group exhibitions and festivals in Austria and abroad and presented her work in solo and group exhibitions: f.e. Tokyo Wonder Site Japan, Slought Foundation Philadelphia, Weimar Art Festival, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art/ Roskilde, Steirischer Herbst in Graz and Anthology Film Archives in NYC. In March 2019, a monograph with Claudia Larcher‘s work was published by deGruyter.