For we are where we are not. (‘Car nous sommes où nous ne sommes pas.’)
Pierre-Jean Jouve, Lyrique, 1956; an epigraph in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994: p. 211).
Informed by his experience of working as a translator, Yuki Okumura’s oeuvre comprises a growing list of escape attempts from identity, individuality, and ego by exploring language, memory, chance-oriented methodologies and site-specific contexts.
Cento has invited the artist to produce an installation at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow. In response, he has determined 136 locations across the globe that, according to Google Maps, share the address 20 Albert Road.
An invitation card has been posted to all of the locations, both in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, to announce the exhibition. The card sent to 20 Albert Road, Glasgow, and any that return, are presented as part of the installation, along with an artist’s book recording all the postal addresses, printed in an edition of 100.
The ‘956 Intersections’ of Okumura’s title refer to those generated when connecting all the locations on the map in alphabetical order, beginning with the second line of the address as listed on Google. The artist made a set of digital renderings that trace the locations in jagged forms. He has used these images as the schemata for paintings produced onsite in the days leading up to the exhibition.
The works comprise materials extant in 20 Albert Road: repurposed MDF panels; press release paper; plaster dust scraped from an exposed wall; and natural emulsion. In the artist’s hand, the mechanical geometry of the diagrams produces a series of quivering harlequins.
The commission builds on Okumura’s body of work concerning art and place, and his interest in the legacies of conceptual art. His film The Man Who (2019) explored the possibility that Stanley Brouwn and On Kawara were the same person (‘29,771 days – 2,094,943 steps’, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels), while his 2016 project with Hisachika Takahashi investigated the two artists’ artistic and biographical overlaps (‘Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura’, Maison Hermès, Tokyo).
This exhibition deals with parallel realities across time and space, anchored by a single name – one that refers to a moment in British colonial history and visualises the ripples of empire across the globe. Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, United States of America: the Albert Roads found in each of these countries were commonly named after Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the consort of Queen Victoria (1819–1901)
The late Queen Elizabeth II’s head stamps the exhibition invitation cards sent within the UK; the new King’s head marks the others. They travel towards their various destinations to meet an ancestral name. Addresses find their sources, as splinters and shreds of a colonial legacy. 136 locations, 136 marks.
