Vienna's Secession opens an exhibition of works by Yuji Agematsu
Yuji Agematsu, zip: 05.01.20 05.31.20, 2020, exhibition view Secession 2021, photo: Sophie Thun.
VIENNA
.-Secession is presenting Yuji Agematsus day-to-day collection of urban detritus finds turned into miniature sculptural formations from the entire 2020 calendar year. Displayed in custom-made acrylic glass shelves that represent monthly calendar sheets, and alongside diary entry notebooks, his 2020 zips offer a fresh and decidedly unique review of a most remarkable year.
Yuji Agematsu is a kind of chronicler of our times and, moreover, he can be considered an experimental cartographer and archivist of only seemingly petty findings from the streets of his hometown. An urban flaneur, Agematsu has taken daily walks through the streets of New York ever since he moved there from Japan in the early 1980s. On this daily routine, which has now been part of his artistic practice for more than a quarter-century, he picks up and scrutinizes litter that attracts his attentionbits of paper, gum, scraps of plastic bags or wrappers, a feather, in short: otherwise overlooked evidence of the hustle and bustle of city life. If found worth collecting, he drops the find into a cellophane sleeve of a cigarette packet (a container the artist names zips) and notes date, time and exact location of the items discovery in a small diary.