Soshiro Matsuba

Soshiro Matsuba (Japan 1980)
Kvindemuseet, Domkirkepladsen 5
Opening hours: Tue-Sat 10.00–17.00, Sun 10.00–16.00. Wednesdays open till 20.00
Admission fee

Love Sick

Desire, love and sexuality suffuse the three-part installation created by Japanese artist Soshiro Matsubara: Love Sick. The exhibition extends across the Women’s Museum’s foyer, ground floor and the plateau on the green first floor. Like several of the artist’s other works, Love Sick draws on the legend of the celebrated composer Alma Mahler’s relationship with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka in the 1900s; upon being abandoned by her, Kokoschka had a doll fashioned in her image in order to assuage his longing for her. The works become emblems of the forces of attraction – from mad obsession to sensuous unions with the beloved. Here, desire and the characters’ immersion in their acts of love drown out everything else: they are heedless of the outside world.
The works are created especially for the Women’s Museum and its ornately decorated spaces; legacies of the building’s former use as the city hall of Aarhus. The museum’s focus on the cultural history of the sexes and the relationship between the sexes is given a psychological and emotional spin through the presence of Matsubara’s works. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan uses the concept of objet petit a to describe objects of desire that can never be attained – addressing the unresolved longing that characterises our imagined relationship with the world around us and which creates feelings of lack and want. Precisely such unresolved yearning has been described as fundamental to the commodity fetish of capitalism, which manages to create a fantasy that the things we buy can satisfy us, sating our hunger to become one with the objects of our dreams.

Read more about the exhibition and the other works here:

Soshiro Matsubara: Love Sick, installation skabt til You Are in My Veins på Kvindemuseet kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.
Soshiro Matsubara: Love Sick, installation skabt til You Are in My Veins på Kvindemuseet kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.
Soshiro Matsubara: Love Sick, installation skabt til You Are in My Veins på Kvindemuseet kurateret af Charlotte Sprogøe for Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus Billedkunstcenter og Galleri Image. Foto: Jan Søndergaard.