Magdalena Abakanowicz and Japan

Milada Ślizińska
(Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw)

The presentation concerns the stays of Magdalena Abakanowicz in Japan and her Japanese contacts in the years 1976 - 1995. It will discuss the period since the artist’s lecture in Kyoto, the creation of Abakano – Kai Foundation, through the readings in Kyoto, Tokyo and Sapporo in 1982, until the retrospective exhibition at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991 with which – as the museum’s director put it – Magdalena took Hiroshima by storm. Subsequent works of the artist are i.a.: “Space of Becalmed Beings” from the series “Backs”, which presents a group of forty hunched figures cast in bronze for the Museum in Hiroshima (1992 - 93) and a choreography for an avant-garde ballet group Akiko Motofuji, who danced in July 1995 in Hiroshima to commemorate the anniversary of atomic bombing.