Simon Fujiwara at Dvir Gallery

Artist: Simon Fujiwara

Exhibition title: Hope House

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Date: September 2 – December 2, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery

For his third exhibition at Dvir Gallery, Simon Fujiwara presents Hope House a new immersive large-scale exhibition centering on a full-scale replica of the Anne Frank House. During a visit to the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, Fujiwara purchased a 1:60 scale model of the building from the gift store, intended as merchandise for visitors to build themselves. For this exhibition, Fujiwara took the model as source material for a full scale, 1:1 architectural replica of the house constructed within the gallery and split across three floors of the building. Imagined as a ‘building within a building’, Hope House features several of the spaces key to the Anne Frank narrative including the secret annex and attic described in her diary. However in this new context, the house can be experienced as a three dimensional, sculptural object where visitors freely circumnavigate in and around the structure offering a radical new experience of the house. In this regard Hope House is neither a museum nor a simple facsimile of the Anne Frank house but a hybrid experience whose origins as a model/product speak of the increasing synthesis of ideology, politics, philanthropy and capitalism. Residing within the spaces of Hope House visitors encounter numerous sculptures, artifacts, domestic interiors, video works and sound installations that together create a Gesamtkunstwerk as well as a material investigation into the ways hope, positivity, empathy and ‘doing good’ perform under the hyper-capitalist ideology of the 21st century. Typical of Fujiwara’s challenging and expansive practice, Hope House presents a rich, contradictory and sometimes uneasy picture of the most cherished of our human desires: to be good, to believe, to love.

Simon Fujiwara works in a variety of mediums, from film and installation to painting and sculpture. In his work, art, history, capitalism, narrative and identity become source material for explorations into the increasing possibilities and problems that new technology and visual languages offer his generation. He became internationally recognized for a series of performances and installations that presented his own biography as a multi-part auto-fiction in which he employed events in his life, friends, family members and historical figures, structuring his own semi-fictional artists’ biography. In recent works, Fujiwara has forged several collaborations to produce his work, including advertising producers, trash collectors, fashion photographers and economists. He is the recipient of several prizes including the Art Basel Baloise Prize and the Frieze Cartier Award. His works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Tate, Guggenheim and MoMA among others.