KYOTOGRAPHIE

“Breaking Walls”
April 15 – May 14, 2023
Kyoto, Japan

The Spanish-born, New York-based artist, Inma Barrero, is delighted to participate in Kyotographie’s 11th anniversary edition in the Spring of 2023.

A trained ceramicist, Barrero creates sculptures and three-dimensional installations using ceramics and metal. Her artistic path has taken her away from traditional expectations, to embrace imperfection and welcome accidents. The broken pieces in her work speak of fractures, natural as well as cultural. The works refer to the broken aspects of our lives, social, personal, spiritual. Barrero does not see breaking as the end of the process, to the contrary, she sees in it a possible way forward, a transformative process.

In 2019, Inma Barrero lived in Kyoto and learned kintsugi, a traditional Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery. While the kintsugi technique uses gold, in her native Spain, broken pottery is repaired using metal clamps. The metal in both traditions is used to create new connections.

For Breaking Walls, Barrero, joined by many pottery and ceramics artists and students, gathered a multitude of broken porcelain pieces from the ceramic workshops of Kyoto. These discarded fragments of diverse origins were inserted into a metal mesh frame, creating a polychromic wall. The creative process echoes the Spanish and Kintsugi repair techniques: together, metal and broken porcelain form something anew. Breaking Walls rises from the ground and opens at its center to welcome people within. Rather than a divider, Barrero sees this piece as a space to bring people together.

 A video installation accompanies Breaking Walls. The film features the destruction of one of Inma Barrero’s delicate and feminine dress-like sculptures. Like the artists who had poured their dedicated self in the pieces they eventually discarded, Barrero too let go of this beloved work. The film chronicles the violence of the act, the coming down of the feminine form, the crumbling of the dress in order to create something new. The artist conceived this piece about feminine transformation, where the movie becomes the art piece. The act of breaking the delicate sculpture becomes the art. A negation of the ultimate destruction, where fragility and strength come full circle.

Made from broken pieces, Barrero’s work shines a new light on the significance of diversity and coexistence, and the importance of traditions, culture and community. 

PRESS

For detailed information about this installation read more here

About Inma Barrero - Inma Barrero is an artist with an object and installation-based practice. Barrero’s iconography and experimental research with ceramic is influenced by her Spanish upbringing, the Latin American continent and her experience living in Japan. Her latest body of work reflects her preoccupation with the fragility of life and a spiritual approach to body and mind.

About Kyotographie - KYOTOGRAPHIE, held in the spring in the ancient city of Kyoto, is one of the few truly international artistic events taking place in Japan. While honoring its millennium of history and tradition, Kyoto is at the same time a leading light of culture on an international scale. Valuable collections of photography and works by internationally renowned artists are exhibited in elegant, historic buildings as well as modern architectural spaces. Some shows feature the work of traditional artisans, while others highlight collaborations with the most modern technology. The exhibitions are presented outside the traditional galley format and work in harmony with the spaces in which they reside. Its goal is to present a multifaceted photography festival that cannot be found anywhere else but Kyoto.