Charlotte Dumas “Entendue / The Brush in Your Hand”

Charlotte Dumas Artist Talk

Saturday, March 14, 3 – 4pm
APK ROOM, TODA BUILDING 3F, 1-7-1, Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo

To commemorate Charlotte Dumas’s visit to Japan for this exhibition, we will be holding an artist talk. We hope you will take this rare opportunity to come along.
If you would like to attend, please fill in the form at the official website and apply.
Please note that depending on the number of people who apply, there may be a standing-only area.

https://www.tomiokoyamagallery.com/en/exhibitions/dumas2026/

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Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyobashi is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Charlotte Dumas entitled “Entendue / The Brush in Your Hand.”
 
Charlotte Dumas was born in the Netherlands in 1977 and continues to be based in Amsterdam. Based on animals with a deep historical connection to humans such as horses and dogs, her works present careful observations of their history, as well as their status and position within our culture. Using photography and video as her primary mediums, she sometimes weaves personal memories and family histories into her work.
 
In 2020, she held the exhibition “Bezoar” (Gallstone) at the Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, which featured installations that combine photography, video, objects, and indigo-dyed fabrics, winning her critical acclaim.
 
Dumas maintains a deep connection with Japan, as seen in her series “Ao” (Blue), for example, which consists of photographs of the wild horses of Yonaguni Island in Okinawa. This series was presented at her 2023 solo exhibition at our gallery.
 
This exhibition features photographic works from her new series “Entendue,” which is centered on memories of her own father and elephants. It also includes the premiere screening of her new film The Brush in Your Hand, and an installation that makes use of the film’s set. The Brush in Your Hand is also scheduled to be screened at Le Studio, the reservation-only mini-theater at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum.
  　
 
“Entendue”: Humans and Elephants, Parents and Children ― Commonalities Across Species
 
The series “Entendue” featured in this exhibition is a multi-format project encompassing photography, film, installation, and books. It originates from the artist’s memories of her own father and elephants.
 
“Entendue” is French for “understood” or “heard.” When Dumas photographed elephant ears, she became interested in the question of what it is we hear from animals like elephants, how we listen to them, and what we understand. Upon learning that these animals communicate through infrasound and nonverbal methods, she chose a title related to the act of hearing.
 
Since she was a child, Dumas would spend time with her father Peter at the zoo, sketching elephants together. Peter, a graphic artist who created detailed watercolors, continued working on his creative output throughout his life, exerting a profound influence on his daughter. During his later years, he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and was cared for by his artist daughter and her mother. He passed away after experiencing changes in his memory and cognition. These memories and experiences between father and daughter, along with the act of “seeing” that they shared over the course of their lives, form the core of this series.
 
 
The monochrome photographs of elephants were taken by the artist after her father’s death. With the Olympus Pen-F camera he had once used, Dumas depicted elephants at the zoo that she visited as a child. The small negatives that are half the size of 35mm film only partially capture the bodies of the adult elephants. In contrast, the baby elephants within the herd are fully framed within the image, their expressions conveying a sense of both fragility and strength.
 
One of the key perspectives portrayed in this series involves the way in which baby elephants play a vital role in terms of bonding and vitality within the structure of the herd. These are creatures that care for their companions and mourn the dead.
 
The images of adult and baby elephants captured by the daughter through her father’s camera impress upon us the fact that, despite being different beings — human and animal — both embody a kind of symbolic contrast between parent and child. Within the photographic expression itself, moreover, the grain of the film and the elephant’s skin relate to each other as textures that have a mutual graininess to them, as if these images had been transformed into something else, situated somewhere in between a photographic image and a graphite drawing.
 
“Entendue” is also an attempt to reimagine the different species of human and animal as beings that share the same sensibilities. It does this by overlaying the elephant family (and its formation) with the artist’s own family: memories of her father, and her own position as a mother to a daughter.
 
These photographs, along with her father’s elephant drawings, were published as the book Entendue.
 
Through these works, viewers will experience fragments of father-daughter memories, where the artist’s memories of being and creating art with her father intersect with each other like memories.

　
 
New Film “The Brush in Your Hand”: Inherited Memory and Creativity
 
This chain of memories developed into Dumas’ new film The Brush in Your Hand.
This work is a kind of portrait centered on three generations: the artist herself, her father Peter, and her youngest daughter Ivy.
The focus here is on stories and narratives pertaining to memories of family, and the way in which creativity is handed down or inherited.
Peter appears in the film through fragments of his own paintings and diaries. Meanwhile, Ivy builds a cardboard house for a toy mouse in an intuitive, tactile act of “making” that echoes her grandfather’s tenacity in a different form. As their distinct creative endeavors intersect, past and present become quietly intertwined with each other, gradually revealing the role of the filmmaker Dumas herself as both daughter and mother.
In addition, the composition where the three figures — the one filming (Dumas) and the ones being filmed (Peter and Ivy) — intersect with each other seems to reflect even the very nature of care through creative acts.
 
The work Boxes Rooms appears  in the film and was created by Ivy and Dumas during the period of making the film Inspired by her daughter’s crafts, these cardboard box rooms are meticulously detailed to the point where the traces of those who have lived there are palpable. They replicate spaces such as the studio that her father used during his lifetime, the family living room, and Dumas’ own studio.
 
In the film, dia positive images are projected into these boxes as well as in Peter’s actual studio. They function as a kind of site that connects the mother-artist, the daughter, and the father as he exists in memories, mediating between present and past recollections.
 
Charlotte Dumas’ latest works explore the ways in which memory and creativity are handed down and inherited.
 
Although this is a personal theme, it evokes a warm sense of empathy in viewers through the universal motifs of family memories and animals. At the same time, by using family and animals as touchstones, it offers us an opportunity to deepen our reflections on the differences and commonalities found in both others and oneself, and in relation to the theme of coexistence. We hope you will take this opportunity to visit the exhibition.