Odahara, Lucas
Sleepless. Colonial Palace, 2022
Courtesy: Lucas Odahara, Foto: Lucas Odahara
Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, ceramic mural, text, and sound, Lucas Odahara’s work probes personal and historical memory to locate experiences and figures that are difficult to trace in dominant historical narratives. For the
Fellbach Triennale, Odahara presents Sleepless, Colonial Palace (2022), an installation of hanging, glazed ceramic tiles and works on paper that examine sleeplessness as an effect of former and ongoing imperial relations.
Who is sleepless, and who sleeps? This question could be posed either literally - recent studies have shown, for example, that white people experience better sleep on average than nonwhite people - or figuratively - imperial dreams live on in the cultures of the Global North, while plundered objects and even the human remains of people whose worlds were destroyed by imperialism occupy the shelves of museum and research collections, unable to find rest.
In Sleepless, Colonial Palace, the sleepless object is the resting place itself. Odahara’s glazed tiles depict objects catalogued as “headrests” in European ethnographic collections. Designed to support the base of the head during sleep, the items trace to a number of formerly colonized lands across the world. Today they are held in various Northern collections including Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, and the University of California, Los Angeles. A series of graphite drawings explore the interiors of contemporary, colonially-themed motels, including one in the artist’s parents’ neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil. Both the headrests and the motel interiors act as stand-ins for the absent bodies of their users, opening space for the viewer’s own projections and desires.
Painted ceramic tiles are a frequent medium in Odahara’s work. The technique hearkens back to the ceramic murals depicting historical scenes that became popular in Brazil, the artist’s birthplace, with the arrival of Dutch colonizers. As usual in Odahara’s work, here the tools of Western history become vehicles not just for other stories, but other kinds of story-making.
Text: Scott Roben; englische Übersetzung: Johanna Schindler
Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, ceramic mural, text, and sound, Lucas Odahara’s work probes personal and historical memory to locate experiences and figures that are difficult to trace in dominant historical narratives. For the
Fellbach Triennale, Odahara presents Sleepless, Colonial Palace (2022), an installation of hanging, glazed ceramic tiles and works on paper that examine sleeplessness as an effect of former and ongoing imperial relations.
Who is sleepless, and who sleeps? This question could be posed either literally - recent studies have shown, for example, that white people experience better sleep on average than nonwhite people - or figuratively - imperial dreams live on in the cultures of the Global North, while plundered objects and even the human remains of people whose worlds were destroyed by imperialism occupy the shelves of museum and research collections, unable to find rest.
In Sleepless, Colonial Palace, the sleepless object is the resting place itself. Odahara’s glazed tiles depict objects catalogued as “headrests” in European ethnographic collections. Designed to support the base of the head during sleep, the items trace to a number of formerly colonized lands across the world. Today they are held in various Northern collections including Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, and the University of California, Los Angeles. A series of graphite drawings explore the interiors of contemporary, colonially-themed motels, including one in the artist’s parents’ neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil. Both the headrests and the motel interiors act as stand-ins for the absent bodies of their users, opening space for the viewer’s own projections and desires.
Painted ceramic tiles are a frequent medium in Odahara’s work. The technique hearkens back to the ceramic murals depicting historical scenes that became popular in Brazil, the artist’s birthplace, with the arrival of Dutch colonizers. As usual in Odahara’s work, here the tools of Western history become vehicles not just for other stories, but other kinds of story-making.
Text: Scott Roben; englische Übersetzung: Johanna Schindler