BAC 06
International Festival of Contemporary Art in Barcelona
Opening: 22 November 20:00 h
From 21 November to 17 December
CCCB c / Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
www.bacfestival.com
Exhibition Catalog Text by Steven Katz:
If you visit Tokyo, you will enter a dense cloud of audio-visual information.
Sound logos, multimedia presentations and snippets of various digital data will aggressively tempt to attract your perception. Even the urban structures are shaped by the information flow. Buildings appear strangely vague behind constantly updated large format advertisements.The scenery servers one purpose: MAKE YOU CONSUME. And you will dive into a futuristic cluster of luxury stores fused with some of Tokyo`s oddities: Arcades, Love Hotels, the occasionally girl in a kimono and whole streets of adult entertainment. Considering this environment breaks down the exotic style of the Harajuku Girls to an understandable subcultures reaction.
Elements of the mainstream materialistic behaviour are sampled and recoded into a new system of values and definitions.
Truly shocking for a conservative observer, but far less rebellion than consumption. Ironically, the name Harajuku actually stands for a shopping district for gothic, fetish and weird fashion.