Borders, Lines, dumb type Lovers: Mediating Dynamics of Displacement, Border-Crossing, Anatomical Transmutation

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Stephen Barber (Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study) explores the past and contemporary status of Teiji Furuhashi’s installation Lovers – made in collaboration with other participants of dumb type – from its first exhibition in Tokyo in 1994 to its recent afterlife reactivations, at venues such as the New York Museum of Modern Art. The paper examines the aberrant dynamics of corporeal and technological migrations raised by Lovers. Although Lovers is the first and last installation work of Furuhashi, it also possesses potential precursors, in the 1880s-90s naked moving figures of Muybridge, in the moving-image experimentation and restricted zones of the 1970 Osaka Exposition, and in the border-crossing preoccupations of the novelist Jean Genet.