Hikaru Fujii is on a remarkable run: Playing Japanese, a video installation consisting of footage of his workshop Performing the Japanese at the Theater Commons Tokyo ’17, won the Grand Prix of the Nissan Art Award 2017. His body of work, which gives visual expression to the historical time of the divisions currently sweeping the world, confronts viewers with a plethora of questions.
Theater Commons Tokyo presents the first Japanese showing of Fujii’s new video work, which he shot and screened in Greece. His camera is pointed at a clock tower in the port of Piraeus on the outskirts of Athens, and at the people who live around it. The area is threatened by a looming economic crisis, and is also at the frontline of the influx of refugees from places like Syria and Africa into Europe. We hear the melody “The Children of Piraeus” from the film Never on Sunday. Now, however, the clock’s hands are incapable of accurately telling the time. Sometimes they are fast, sometimes slow, past and present forming a complex mesh: such is the nature of time in Piraeus… As the people who live there tell their stories, how will we experience Europe’s “different time” (heterochronia)?

-This work was produced and released in conjunction with Akira Takayama’s tour performance Piraeus/Heterotopia in 2017 at Athens’ Fast Forward Festival 4.