Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery), 2010

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Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery)
installation view at Giò Marconi, 2011
except the last picture: Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) at Manifesta 8 (Murcia)

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Frozen, 2010
excavation sites, sign boards, maps, mixed media
installation view at Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010

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Desk Job, 2009
The Collectors, Nordic Pavillion, 53rd Venice Biennale

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SIMON FUJIWARA’s Clapham studio, south London
photo © GAUTIER DEBLONDE

all works and images courtesy of the artist

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SIMON FUJIWARA is a storyteller: through novels, theatre plays, lectures and installations, SIMON FUJIWARA writes scripts and performs his own real-life biography as fiction -a drama in which he plays multiple characters including historian, playwright, novelist, anthropologist and eroticist – which question the possibility of manipulating history and affecting collective memory through individual experience.

“I keep coming back to moments in the past where there is little or no information, where even academic theses have to rely on assumptions and leaps of faith, as it gives me more freedom to manipulate the material into a story I want to tell”

His installation “Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) (2010),” for example tells the true story of the discovery of a giant, ancient stone phallus beneath the foundations of a new museum building, somewhere in the Arabian Desert. No records of its existence or disappearance exist. Some say it was destroyed, others saw an unlabelled crate departing for an unknown destination. The truth is in the hands of four British men who were working on the museum’s construction site. However, when FUJIWARA commissioned them to re-fabricate the phallus as they remembered it, arguments ensued. One witness remembers testicles, another claims it was simply a column. Some say it was three meters long, others eight. Size is not the question here—it is the shape that counts.

Born in Japan to a British dancer mother and a Japanese architect father, SIMON FUJIWARA studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, then spent time at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and became an artist. He lives and works between Berlin and London. In 2011 he won the South Bank Arts Awards, as emerging visual artist. In 2010 he won the Baloise Art Prize, for Art Basel 41 and the Cartier Award for Frieze Art Fair.