IBASHO Gallery’s newest exhibition will be a solo exhibition of the works by Hitoshi Fugo. Under the name BLACKOUT, the solo exhibition can be visited from 21 March until 19 May.
The exhibition features works that Fugo has created over a long period from the early 1980s to the early 2000s during his extensive travels to India, Mexico and the U.S. The series captures the subtle moments of the everyday passage of time. Fugo’s uniquely dark and abstract vision goes back to his childhood trauma of severe asthma attacks. Recalling the sensation of losing consciousness while gasping for air, he writes: “I became aware through such experiences that the world, myself included, is constantly transforming.” Fugo then refers to the moment that he presses the shutter button of his camera, lifting the mirror inside during which short moment he only sees the pitch black darkness within the camera. He calls this fraction of a moment 暗転 （’anten’ in Japanese, meaning blackout, the theatrical term indicating the moment of blackness before a scene change). For Fugo photography is not about documenting reality but about the ability of photography to disconnect objects and people from reality during this moment of a blackout. With the series BLACKOUT Fugo discovered how he could express his inner world, resulting in mesmerising images free from a specific time or location.
Born in 1947, Hitoshi Fugo studied photography at Nihon University in Tokyo. After graduation, he worked for Eikoh Hosoe, a leading postwar photographer in Japan. In 1973 he became a freelance photographer and lived in New York and Paris for the next several years. During the 1970s and 1980s, he travelled extensively and created many series including BLACKOUT, which he first exhibited in Tokyo in 1982 under the title Dark Changes. Fugo’s work has had international exposure in exhibitions such as Japanese Photography Today (Spain, 1986), Japanese Contemporary Photography (Germany, 2000) and BLACKOUT (U.S., 2018). He is a winner of Ina Nobuo Photography Award in 2010.
IBASHO is a gallery in Antwerp showing fine art Japanese photography as well as works from Western photographers who were inspired by Japan. The gallery is opened from Friday until Sunday from 14.00 till 18.00 and by appointment.
Source: IBASHO
