Burrow

In Kyoco Taniyama's practice, the concept of ubiquity - being situated in a particular context, in a particular place - is omnipresent. Her installations are multi-layered interpretations of this interrelation between places, people, and identities with a view to culture, history, and everyday life in a particular place. Hereby, she is interested in the way politics and society deal with negative aspects and events in the present and in the past, and the tendency not to come to terms with them, but to to conceal them. In Berlin, she combines thrown-away objects that she collects into abstract sculptures, which she documents photographically and by video before creating beautifully formed artistic metaphors for concealment. 

"Stone will flow, leaves will sink" is a Japanese phrase – it is a metaphor used to denote unusual or contradictory deviations from expected outcomes or conditions. This project is part of a small multilingual visual identity, used for printed announcement materials and a larger publication as part of the exhibition „stone will flow, leaves will sink“, shown at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin from 17 Jan – 19 Feb 2019. The multi-layered identity has been developed by experimenting with different printing techniques and different paper types. In total 3 different paper types have been used though-out, including a recycling paper in combination with silkscreen print. The contradiction of printing on cheaply produced recycling paper with a precious printing technique, transfers Taniyama’s concept of concealment and revelation into the context of graphic design and print.