Kintsugi Part II, The Presence of your Absence. Argentina Version.
It took place at the Centro Municipal de Arte Avellaneda (CMA). June-July 2019.
Hosted by Familiares de Desaparecidos de la Colectividad Japonesa (FDCJ), the Japanese Embassy in Argentina, the Japanese Association (AJA) and the support of the Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement grant.
Forty years after seeing her father taken away forever, the artist decided that, instead of rebuilding her life forgetting, it was time to remember.
This commemoration did not only refer to the beloved person, but also to all the disappeared belonging to the Japanese community, and thus promised to "give life" through color to the 17 missing Nikkei.
Gaby Oshiro works in this portrait reproduction exercise, giving the practice the name of Kintsugi, which in the Japanese tradition is the art of recognizing beauty in something that has been broken. This metaphor conceived by the artist is recognizable in her works, which express the concept of self-healing from the creation, combining fragments and sealing them with the color of memory.
As usual in collaboration with the Italian architect Germano Dalla Pola who deals with the planning of the exhibition.
The first part of the exhibition was exhibited in September-October 2016, in the Cultural Space of the Library of the National Congress of Buenos Aires, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Association in Argentina.
The second part took place in the Galleria dell'Artistico in December 2018 - January 2019, a cultural space belonging to the fine arts school in Treviso, the place where Gaby Oshiro completed her studies and the Italian city that hosted his family during the reconstruction of a new life.
The exhibition proposes a kind of reappropriation of the physical space: each portrait and chair make that empty space left by the 17 Nikkei tangible.
The chair ceases to be an object of everyday use and becomes the symbol, in the presence of absence.
The enormous absence left by the disappeared is still palpable, it feels as much as the presence of when they were alive, and perhaps even more.
The relatives of the disappeared continue to seek justice and answers about the destiny of their loved ones. These faces that reappear in Gaby Oshiro's canvases are the testimony that they have never been forgotten, nor will they be.
Text courtesy of Paola Pepa from Arte Argentina, Italy.