Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Once Upon A Who, 2021, Installation with stop-motion animation, duration: 4:48 min. Reference room size: 4 x 5 m (13 x 16 ft.) approx, edition of 8 plus 2 artist's proofs
Who is Who, you ask? The cartoon is the creation of artist Simon Fujiwara—a character who travels Google and pops into various art-world images to try on different personas. Part of the series premiered at the Prada Foundation in 2020.
Who the Baer is the central character in your new exhibition. Why did you decide to create them?
I liked the name Who the Baer because it reminded me of other famous cartoons like Pooh, and using a question like Who? as a name allows for all kinds of wordplay and confusion, which were very appealing to me. Because the world is so confusing and bizarre at the moment, I feel the only appropriate reaction is Dada in spirit—that’s to say, non-sensical. So, Who is a nobody, without an identity. Who circumnavigates the problem of identity politics—which has become one of the driving factors of our century—by not having an identity at all. Who is a proposition, a theory made flesh through hundreds of drawings, collages, and sculptures. But Who is really a fairy tale, in the end, one that asks “What if…?” and allows us to imagine things we are not really allowed to imagine or question at the moment.
Read the full article here