Takashima Yasushi | Yanase Asato, from "Thou Shalt Not Care" ("Macht nichts"), "The Female Demon King"
Yanase Asato recites Jelinek's play "The Female Demon King" while projecting 2021 Tokyo Olympic torchbearer footage onto her face, questioning the state's staging of national narratives.Summary
This review discusses Yanase Asato's exhibition "Thou Shalt Not Care" ("Macht nichts"), specifically the work "The Female Demon King," held at gallery αM. Yanase recites the first part of Elfriede Jelinek's play "Macht nichts: A Small Trilogy of Death after Schubert's Songs," whose protagonist is modeled on Paula Wessely, a celebrated Burgtheater actress with a Nazi propaganda past. The monologue, delivered posthumously, satirizes how power creates national stars through media, forming the fictional community of "we." Yanase performs the recitation while projecting digest footage of torchbearers from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics onto her own face. The uncut 35-minute video reveals chilling resonances between Jelinek's text and the state-orchestrated spectacle of the Olympics, exposing how national events stage narratives of "reconstruction" and "Japanese identity." The torchbearers' uniform smiles and identical uniforms, the route through disaster-stricken areas as a "stage set," and the insertion of Emperor Showa's 1964 Olympics footage all link to the play's lines, highlighting the proximity of the Olympics to totalitarianism. Yanase's own head, casting a large black shadow that erodes the projected image, visualizes the invisible power that consumes individuals. The work paradoxically revives the dead through speech while burying them, asking what forces stage what in this world.
(Source：artscape)