Press Release
The artists Kosen Ohtsubo and Christian Köun Alborz Oldham share an unusual approach to ikebana and an interest in how one person enables the work of another. With Flower Planet, Kunstverein München presents two artists in ongoing dialog with each other who create fragile sculptures that challenge us to see the earth as a living entity and not as territory to be owned. Working with living material, their practices confront us with questions of being in and with this world, processes of decay, and the elusive nature of human control.
International ongoing exhibitions
The Japanese artist Kosen Ohtsubo is one of the most important practitioners and teachers of the art form of ikebana. Traditionally, the ikebana arrangement is intended to bring nature into the human habitat through precious plants, arranged in such a way to represent the cosmic order. In the 1970s, however, Ohtsubo became well-
Christian Köun Alborz Oldham is concerned with the relationships inscribed in the production and life of things. They understand ikebana and working with living matter as acts of negotiation. A negotiation of time, space, material, and of human interrelations. In 2013, Oldham first saw Ohtsubo’s work in a book, followed by years of correspondence and training in Japan in an intensive teacher-
The title of the exhibition Flower Planet refers to the name Ohtsubo gave his ikebana workshop and describes a simple yet complex idea: understanding the world as a readymade, and all existing materials and ecosystems of plants, animals, and people as ikebana. The practices by Oldham and Ohtsubo do not imitate an idea of nature but rather reproduce the artificiality of human concepts of it. Their understanding of ecology and conceptual art practice is an urgent component in the current state of our (surrounding) world. In moments of disorientation, improvisation, and appropriation, the works make us aware of the fragility of our coexistence.
Exhibition 1st February -
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