KANAKO ISHII‘s works are characterized by her engagement with metaphysical boundaries and apparent opposites – past and present, memory and forgetting, presence and absence.

Her current work, a video istallation to be seen in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, is about childhood. In an encounter with texts by German philosopher Walter Benjamin, Ishii develops a visual concentration of the subject, which is linked irrevocably to questions of memory and the relationship between present and past. In this context, the emphasis is less on a showing of concrete objects or motifs and far more on the image’s potential as a medium of remembrance and its function as a passage to the imaginary: rather than reverting to the representational, Ishii uses silence and delicate movements to reflect on how images evoke things past without simply reproducing or repeating them in the process. The “images of memory” that evolve here are dynamic constellations and transitory zones of passage and transition, opening up our perception to a ghostly space of the remembered, the dreamt and the imaginary.