FOR OUR SPIRITS - Camden Art Centre
Type
Exhibitions
Format
In the Building
Date 20/25 Feb 2024
Price Free entry
Supporters

Nissa Nishikawa’s FOR OUR SPIRITS was made possible through the generous support of The Arts Council of England. Produced with John Leach Pottery, Aurora Irvine/Olfactory Specialist, Chokokuji Temple and the animals, Beatrice Brown, Rochester Square, Jack Cox, Cernamic Studio, Rylance Architectural Ironworks, Jawara Alleyne Studio, Holmes Glass, Akihide Monna, Eloi Guri, The Glass Foundry and The Bethnal Green Nature Reserve/Phytology.

Nissa Nishikawa’s installation, 'FOR OUR SPIRITS' was seeded with encoded ancestral rituals through the living mediums of ceramics, glass, textiles, steel, wood, moving image, olfactories, sound and dance.

Created in receptivity to calls of rage, growth and solidarity, Nishikawa intuits ceremonial artworks and movements that honour co-creation as a mode of retrieval and exploration.

In the universal system of animism, specifically that of Shinto, kami are revered forces that take form as physical, natural and mythological phenomena. This collection of work is not a referential gesture to this tradition – they exist as the kami in themselves and as manifestations of divinities in the earthly realm. They are the spirits interpreted anew.

They are to be beheld, felt and moved with.
They are of the living and also, the dead.
And this requires a fire in the dark; a circle around the flame; mandalas and wood for burning to shield against the miasma; a movement that embodies the collective, dancing with their solar information.
Infused with found, raw and handcrafted materials to sculpt with the element of fire, Nishikawa’s process weds somatic and spiritual bodies as a locus for the transformation of crisis.

Sonic smoke composed in a triangulation of cymbal and gong tonalities by Austin Williamson.

 

Images Related Events The Artist
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Claims of Them', 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Claims of Them', 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'The Circulation of Animals,' 2024
Nissa Nishikawa, 'The Circulation of Animals,' 2024
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Thread in Smoke', 2022. Ceramic canvas. Image courtesy of DUPLEX Gallery.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Thread in Smoke', 2022. Ceramic canvas. Image courtesy of DUPLEX Gallery.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Clay Body', 2020. Photo by Nicol Vizioli.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Clay Body', 2020. Photo by Nicol Vizioli.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Claims of Them', 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Claims of Them', 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Thread in Smoke', 2022. Ceramic canvas. Image courtesy of DUPLEX Gallery.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Thread in Smoke', 2022. Ceramic canvas. Image courtesy of DUPLEX Gallery.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'The Circulation of Animals,' 2024
Nissa Nishikawa, 'The Circulation of Animals,' 2024
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Clay Body', 2020. Photo by Nicol Vizioli.
Nissa Nishikawa, 'Clay Body', 2020. Photo by Nicol Vizioli.

A MANDALIC MOVEMENT: Millicent Hodson and Nissa Nishikawa

20 Feb (2024)
This clearing, offering, and calling activated three elements of the Nissa Nishikawa installation with martial and meditative movements.

‘This air moved us here
Being the space where we are
Lifting voices
Calls of relations
Seven drawings of the sword
And a serpent in tall sweet grass.
Sealing the stars
With lightning dividing our bodies
We close our eyes and watch the bolt.’

Millicent Hodson is a choreographer and a master of Chinese martial arts. Since 2002 she has directed her Hampstead School of Taiji, often presenting demonstrations of classic forms and weapons. Together with Kenneth Archer (Scenic Consultant and Art Historian), they reconstruct lost ballets and create new productions through Ballets Old & New, staging work worldwide with major ballet companies. Hodson and Archer write books and articles on dance/design and often collaborate on documentary dance films. One of many books, The Lost Rite, London (2014) with photographer Shira Klasmer, was translated into Russian by the Vaganova Academy, St Petersburg. She and Archer have published Balanchine’s Twenties; five bijoux books on their reconstructions of his early ballets (2019-2021). In 2022 at The Place, London, they held an exhibition and released the catalog Dance Detectives Diary: photographs by Shira Klasmer of Hodson’s sculptures on lost ballets with texts by Archer.

Hodson has received various choreography and writing grants and awards from US National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, BBC Music and Monaco, Biarritz and Positano Festivals, to name a few.

Workshop: BODY FLARE

21 Feb (2024)
This workshop was held by Nissa Nishikawa and Michele Occelli and focused on diverse disciplines of meditation and movement. It aimed to develop sensitivity and concentration, intuition and trust, as a psychophysical experience that connects the body to the living earth.

BODY FLARE was a journey into the expansion of somatic awareness, through the synthesis of the senses in the experience of the collective body, understood as a variable, an unpredictable organism in constant exchange with the climate.
This workshop was a conversation with the environment, where landscape became body became dance. Together the group decoded sensory information with specific exercises rooted in the meditational, the martial and the choreographic.
Michele Occelli’s approach to hypnosis utilises a combination of Ericksonian and ideo-dynamic techniques to enable processes of change and self-discovery. After years of academic research in both eastern and western philosophy (SOAS, King’s College and Goldsmith’s College), he trained as a whirling dervish with the Mevlevi Order of Konya. The study and practice of hypnosis came because of a desire to engage both mind and body as a unity, which is the basis for any form of understanding of both self and the world. He is currently assistant tutor on the postgraduate Hypnotherapy Diploma for the BHRTS at Birkbeck College

The Artist

Nissa Nishikawa’s multidimensional practice comprises performance, poetry, painting, sculpture and moving image. She researches and interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual and craft in ways that illuminate animistic and alchemical philosophies with an embodied and structural approach. Nishikawa often works in the open-air and studios equipped to house fire; interconnecting the layers of the arcane with the supra-sensual, the living earth and various conscious inhabitants.

Particular past site-specific works include Pattaya (Thailand), the Archaeological Zone Tepozteco (Mexico), and Abu Gorab Temple (Egypt). Workshops have been offered at The British University of Egypt (Cairo), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Architectural Association (London), American Language Centres across  Morocco, Volte Art Projects (Mumbai), Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Royal College of Art (London).  Her work has been shown internationally in theatres, museums, galleries, fields, forests and film.

Nishikawa holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal, and Masters in Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied Stage Arts at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and exercised in her formative years with the dancer/farmer Min Tanaka in Yamanashi, Japan.

Related Programme

Events THE CIRCULATION OF ANIMALS IS THE EPOCH FIRE (II)

THE CIRCULATION OF ANIMALS IS THE EPOCH FIRE (II)

25 Feb 2024/25 Feb 2024
In the Building