www.simonwhetham.co.uk
Artist-in-residence at AiR Koganecho, Yokohama, Japan
I am extremely honoured and priviledged to have received support from Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation to participate in the residency programme at AiR Koganecho in Yokohama, Japan, and have also received Koen nominal support from British Council Japan.
During the residency I will make collaborative works with Japanese artists Suzuki Elico, Minoru Sato and Ohta Takamitsu. These are artists I have admired the work of for many years and I am extremely happy to be working with all of them at some point. I will also be making new 'Deconstructed' works that take donations of unwanted and disused electrical consumer products and opens them up, presenting them in a way that resembles the exploded diagrams of products found towards the end of instruction manuals that would have accompanied the objects when first purchased. These works will be presented in September as part of the Koganecho Bazaar 2026 exhibition.
The video links show the first stages of making new 'Deconstructed' works, the first being a CD Walkman that was donated to my project Made to Malfunction in Chiba commissioned for Chiba City Art Triennale 2025. I managed to salvage some of the donations, plus a great deal of the electronics purchased for the project last year.
The second is a CD-ROM reader tray that I took from a used desktop computer tower bought from Hard-Off, mainly for the power supply. Hacking it to open and close I also managed to activate the LED indicator.
Deconstructed Radio #9 is the latest analogue radio I have been given (thank you to artist Keiso Yo) and presented in this way. The unusual shape made it a little tricky to 'explode' but the results can be seen in the third clip.
The television in the fourth clip was kindly donated by AiR Koganecho from their storage space and has proved to be more of a challenge than expected, but the results are satisfactory.
