Ken Kitano (1968, Tokyo) has a highly philosophical approach and his work is characterised by longterm projects, as can be seen in his solo-exhibition ‘Gathering Light’.

The title of the exhibition refers to his latest series 'Gathering Light', that Kitano started after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Kitano started to think about the earth, the sun and the universe in relation to one another. For ‘Gathering Light', he installed a film camera on a rooftop from the winter solstice to the summer solstice to create a long exposure. After six months, he carefully removed the camera and recovered the film. Once the images were developed, they were scanned and adjusted to uncover the recorded traces of light. Having remained unchanged for 4.6 billion years, the revolution of the Earth and the rotation of the cosmos are etched into the photographs through a myriad of lines. The images appear and finally shows what the human eye was unable to perceive. For Kitano this is the quintessence of photography.

Also other projects of Kitano will be exhibited, such as 'our face'. Each composite photograph in ‘our face’ contains a large number of overlapping portraits – depicting people belonging to various different social groups – printed on the same sheet of photographic paper. In making the work, Kitano discovered that there are many kinds of ‘others’ on this earth, and that this should be celebrated.

In his older series Kitano has deployed long exposure times to capture sunrise to sunset throughout the course of one single day ('one day') and to capture the people of Tokyo melting as plural existences on the street into one flow of light ('Flow and Fusion').

Image: Tsukumi City, Oita, Gathering Light, 2016 © Ken Kitano, courtesy IBASHO gallery, Antwerp and MEM, Tokyo

Artists: Ken Kitano