Hays Gallery

Clara Joris

Deja Vu

 

I met Kae Ishimoto at an Art Festival in Iceland (curated by Mireya Samper), which I joined along with fifty other international artists. With admiration and emotions that I cannot explain in simple words, I witnessed an incredible interaction between many of the artists who found interesting ways of working together during that parenthesis in the time.

 

In this swirl of impressions, wrapped in boreal lights, I discovered Kae, the daughter and granddaughter of Japanese dancers, who always danced with a special magic, trying to combine between the traditional and the modern in her culture.

 

She was constantly dancing, and while she was dancing she created a world of her own, so far away and so near at the same time. She shared this world with whoever wanted to stop for a moment and take the time to look at her.

 

The last night of the year came. On this bewitched night, the tradition in Iceland is to build a huge bonfire and burn all the old things to make room for the things to come. Once more Kae danced with the fire on the island of ice, stopping the motion of time in a perpetual “déjà vu” that took you back to ancestral times.

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