Yutaka Sone

Birthday Party

03.03.2022

Tommy Simoens, Antwerp

 

 

 

In 1997, the installation Birthday Party by Yutaka Sone was exhibited for the first time at the fourth Sculpture Projects Münster exhibition in Germany, and made Sone world-renowned. In the video, Sone celebrates his own birthday every day with a variety of people that he encounters in the city of Munster. He recorded people singing birthday songs and him blowing out the candles on the cake. He then played the edited 22-minute video on a monitor placed in the underground passageway in front of Münster’s Central Station. Daring to show a private video in a public place, the exhibit challenged the traditional relationship between the individual and society. Sculpture Projects in Münster is an international sculpture exhibition, but the artist told project director Kasper König that to him video works are sculptures. The artist wanted to make a ’sculpture’ of a humble personal history, of the joyful memory that everyone has of celebrating his birth into this world—to make a ’sculpture‘ of shapeless memory and light. This presents a new perspective on society and public places, a new way of seeing things, an approach that is a consistent theme in Sone’s work. before the opening of his exhibition Yutaka Sone: Movie Theatre, at Tommy Simoens, Antwerp—on the occasion of the artists‘ birthday—a birthday party was held at the gallery, as the latest addition to the artists’ ungoing sculpture project