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Since opening in October 2003, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum has built its curatorial programme around large-scale group shows that involve a diverse range of contemporary artists. Showcasing consistently challenging work, the museum has also succeeded in drawing impressive audience figures by tightly focusing the exhibitions on immediately engaging, accessible themes.

The museum continues this trend with ‘The World Is A Stage: Stories Behind Pictures’, a group show featuring artists such as Kara Walker, Mark Wallinger, Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Tracey Moffatt working across diverse mediums and exploring a range of cultural milieus. The exhibition posits the universality of storytelling, even as it illustrates the fracturing of narrative and insists upon the importance of specificity and context.

As its title suggests, the exhibition is concerned with evoking the density of narrative that can collect around imagery. This is immediately and strongly established through the cinematic photographs of Gregory Crewdson’s ‘Twilight’ series (1998– 2002). Immaculately produced images of staged ambiguity, the photographs veer off into possible and plausible narratives. Wolves gather on a suburban doorstep; a woman floats in a mid-American interior, half submerged in water. Plunging into the language of the occult and exploring the aftermath of unspecified disasters and paranormal activities, Crewdson’s photographs sustain any number of unresolved stories within a single fixed image.





Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler elaborate upon this Lynchian atmosphere in Single Wide (2002), a circular video work wrought in the beguiling structure of a Möbius strip. A woman moves through a trailer home before crashing it with her truck before moving through a trailor home again. The narrative of the video folds back on itself, forsaking the clarity of linearity, instead dispersing into the fabric of detailed interiors and an atmosphere thick with unresolved tension. Ultimately this story of psychological claustrophobia is best communicated through the inexorableness of the video’s relentless circularity.

The slippery circularity of narrative continues in Jananne Al-Ani’s video installation A Loving Man (1996/99). A single narrative travels round a circle of disembodied heads, as each woman repeats the same story, then builds upon the narrative through the addition of a single sentence. In the blackened spaces of the installation these women listen and talk in a ghostly colloquy, faces turned and speaking in thoughtfulness. The installation emphasises the individual, irreconcilable ways in which the most universal of stories – that of disappointed love – is experienced.

Similarly Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Consolation Service (1999) explores the fracturing of narrative that results from the slow failure of a marriage. Ahtila’s work ricochets lightly from the mundane to the fantastical, and the exhibition likewise interrogates the way in which the logic of fantasy dovetails into the most quotidian of stories. But rather than upholding the fabric of the fantasy, these artists deliberately identify those points where fantasy comes undone and falls into apprehension and unease. Tomoko Konoike’s installations and paintings depict dream landscapes inhabited by hybrid wolves and young girls. Evoking and then exposing the underside of fairy tale narratives – with the wolf appearing as a kind of textbook externalisation of Little Red Riding Hood’s unconscious desires and aggressions – Konoike’s work chops apart the linearity of some of the most familiar stories in our culture.

Similarly, in Tracey Moffatt’s Adventure Series (2004) photographs cut into the familiar narratives of 1970s television shows. A comically rigid series of tableaux expose the sexual and racial stereotypes of the period, while simultaneously exploring cultural notions of otherness and the role that exoticism plays in our ideas of excitement and adventure. The perceived violence underlying the (colonial) pursuit of the exotic is also emphasised; tellingly, in Adventure Series 6, the narrative tumbles into a familiar disaster scenario, exploding into flames, debris and blackened silhouettes.

In a sense, the violent trauma of disaster is always lurking in these images, whether it is the photographs of Crewdson or the sci-fi landscapes of Konoike.
From this perspective the baffling circularity of narrative and the thematic inclination towards fantasy’s precipice are simply two sides of the traumatic event. Trauma, whether on a collective or personal level, haunts the exhibition. In Karen Yasinsky’s animated film Fear (2001) tearful plane passengers struggle to achieve physical contact; the anxiety of that suggested contact is repeated in images of airplanes and cars, caught in paths of near-collision. Meanwhile, in Anneè Olofsson’s photographs, the trauma of touch is made fully manifest. Unfamiliar (2001) and Skinned (2001) relate stories of abuse within the family, with the identity of the artist obstructed by a pair of aged, groping male hands. Meanwhile, the series God Bless the Absentees (2000) depicts young women literally dissolving into the backdrop of domesticity, clothed in the fabric of rugs and upholstery.

Perhaps Stefan Exler’s photographs, without explicitly referencing a source (or narrative) of distress, best represent the blockages trauma inserts into the reading of both narrative and image. His dense, brightly lit images of domestic spaces are crowded with an excess of detail. Shot from above, the images are without obvious centre. Every object takes on the status of a clue, equally significant or insignificant, without necessarily contributing towards a coherent whole. These images are, in a sense, unreadable; and indeed, much of the work in the exhibition jams the legibility of narrative, subverting its reliability and authority. This destabilisation is perhaps demanded by the increasingly masked nature of contemporary narrative, and the very thesis of the exhibition itself.

However, in some of the strongest work the narrative thrust is almost immediately apparent. The work of Kara Walker, William Kentridge and Mark Wallinger references a collective and historical idea of trauma. Kara Walker’s silhouette cut-outs masterfully capture the fantastical inconsistencies and traumas of black American narrative and experience. William Kentridge’s animations communicate the disconnection between the atrocity that surrounds us and our own capacity to experience and understand trauma. Mark Wallinger’s video Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), meanwhile, depicts passengers arriving in the UK to a soundtrack of Allegri’s Miserere, deftly referencing the troubled history of Empire.

These are works that explode beyond personal conflict and explore the ramifications of global, historical and context-specific traumas. And though it might seem as if personal paralysis, claustrophobia or disappointed love comprise a more universal narrative, these historically engaged works perhaps emphasise that this is based not so much on the subject matter, but in the telling of the story. These are not simply pictures that tell stories, but stories that demand the production of images, to help us process, understand and remember.

Katie Kitamura

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