Rehearsal for a Reunion (With the Father of Pottery) 再会のためのリハーサル（陶芸の父とともに）

Simon FUJIWARA (1982) continues to receive high international acclaim for producing works that reveal the hidden backgrounds behind social customs and cliches through detailed investigations and the collecting of artifacts inspired by his own personal history, to which he further allows elements of fiction to intervene. Born to a Japanese father and an English mother, Fujiwara lived in Japan until he was four years old, thereafter living in England and other cities throughout the world with his mother due to his parents’ divorce. For Rehearsal for a Reunion which was produced for the exhibition “Berlin 2000-2011: Playing among the Ruins” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2011, Fujiwara visited his long estranged father and engaged in pottery together. The video presents a rehearsal of this reunion that is enacted by the artist himself and a German actor who plays the role of his father. He complexly interweaves conflicting concepts such as actual event and rehearsal, original and replica, a blood related father-son relationship and a spiritual father-son relationship, and by cleverly incorporating fiction into their context, questions viewers as to the trueness of emotions that are evoked as a result of fabricated narratives.