Simon Fujiwara

Lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City.

Born in London, UK in 1982, Simon Fujiwara moved to Carbis Bay near St Ives at the age of four and lived in Cornwall until he was sixteen. After a year spent in Japan he completed his secondary education in London and then took a BA in Architecture at Cambridge University before moving to the Städelschule Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied fine art.

Through novels, theatre plays, lectures and installations, Simon Fujiwara scripts and performs his own biography as fiction – a drama in which he plays the roles of multiple characters: artist, novelist, anthropologist, eroticist, architect, playwright. Fujiwara fuses the personal with grand socio-political and historical themes. In The Museum of Incest (2008, ongoing) Fujiwara guides audiences through his fictive museum proposal for Africa’s ‘Cradle of Mankind’, presenting early man’s evolution through incest practices. Meanwhile in his theatre play The Mirror Stage (2009, ongoing) Fujiwara re-stages his first encounter with a modern artwork at the Tate in his hometown of St Ives, presenting multiple versions of an event during puberty that elicited deep artistic and sexual conflicts in him.

Recent exhibitions include The Collectors, Nordic Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); Bringing Up Knowledge, MUSAC, León (2010); Impersonator, MAK Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); and All the Memory in the World, GAM Turin (2010). Forthcoming exhibitions include Manifesta 8, Murcia 2010 and Tate St Ives 2011.