| アマテラスの赤ちゃん (Amaterasu no akachan)
Installation, Story, Performance & Video, 2016 In a nation where the vagina primarily remains unspoken with an awkward resonance, I dreamt of giving birth to a new insight to create some relief and enlightenment within the Japanese people. To do so I offered the opportunity to be comfortable with this specific topic the Japanese usually feel uncomfortable with.How? Simply by inviting them to sit down in a two and a half meter wide sofa shaped as this "most female body part", build out of materials they usually are very comfortable in, namely the so called "futon" (a Japanese traditional bed) and inspired on and accompanied by an ancient Japanese myth of the supreme goddess Amaterasu in which the vagina turns out to be the story's hero. During this experience several women said thank you for they had gained a whole new awareness of their own body and for the first time felt reconciled with all their body parts. アマテラスの赤ちゃん is part of a series art works I call ANA-SYROMAI, a word from Greek mythology, which freely translated means "the joy of exposing the most female body part". Worldwide and in various periods of time many magical stories can be found about this apotropaic device; to bring happiness and good fortune or, as in the story of Amaterasu, simply to save the world. Through my art I express a sincere desire to enrich people's imagination, experiences and relationship with "the most female body part" and wish to share the joy of ANA-SYROMAI with all. (Yvonne Beelen) ± 88 parts of Japanese futon and one zaisu
shaped by the Japanese wrapping culture of furoshiki
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YVONNE BEELEN NL "The art of Yvonne Beelen has a healing potency by exposing a thorny issue in a merciful light. The mercifulness of a rich, layered and nuanced language that she gives to those who come with her," a quote from the Christian magazine "Adrem"Yvonne Beelen is a Dutch conceptual artist, who expresses herself in a wide range of disciplines: drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, videos, graphic designs and community art. In 2004 she achieved nationwide acclaim with her first and remarkable work "Kom Kutje Kleien!" (a funny Dutch phrase that invites to sculpt a vagina in clay), an ongoing art project about peoples vagina imaginations by which she plays at theater festivals, exhibits in museums and continues collecting stories world wide. In 2008 she asked inhabitants of a multicultural neighborhood to help her design an image of a vagina that would make them happy, with as a result the six meter high mural "Motherland" to celebrate the place where we all come from, which still remains there in a public street of Rotterdam. In 2016 she lived and worked in Japan to research and create art inspired by vagina stories in Japanese history and mythology with which she had the solo exhibition "Ana-Syromai" in an art museum on Kyushu, Japan. www.collectiony.earth >> |