Filmed in Tokyo and Yokohama, ‘of girls’ brings a variety of contemporary voices in resonance with two distinct female voices from Japan’s literary and political past. Both popular authors of their time—the period from the late 1920s on—Fumiko Hayashi and Yuriko Miyamoto both died young, in 1951. They each had a strong feminist and class consciousness as well as an impressive literary voice, but came from very different backgrounds and expressed their ideals through different paths. The power and contradictions in both these women’s words reverberate in dialogues and images of an intergenerational cast moving through the various spaces of knowledge, memory and culture, and reflect today’s struggles around gender, politics, and love.
Biography
Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. Recent solo presentations include: unset on-set at MOT Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 2022/23; work, work, work (work) at Museum Sztuki in Lodz 2021; tono lengua boca at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2020 and CA2M Madrid 2019/20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including recently the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, Singapore Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin/Zentrum Paul Klee Bern 2019, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2020 and Sonsbeek20->24, Arnhem 2021.