"Sharon Lockhart: Goshogaoka "

Artist Sharon Lockhart is a photographer and film director, known for the long-term projects she creates based on in-depth research, often in cooperation with communities. Her films are meticulously planned, characterized by freeze-frame shots or minimal camera movements. They present people, places, and events related to daily routine. Lockhart directs her filmed subjects using choreography that she usually develops by herself.

Lockhart's engagement with daily routine, as well as the minimal movement of the camera, is a form of cultural-political resistance. The fast-moving commercial image seeks to powerfully, almost violently affect the viewer. In response, many artists, Lockhart included, focus on the simplicity and even banality of daily life. Lockhart seeks to enhance the viewer's sensitivity to micro-events that surround her in her daily routine. In the project presented in this exhibition the artist places her American culture, characterized by the consumerist spectacle, in opposition to the ideal of simplicity and minimalism deeply rooted in Japanese culture.

In the autumn of 1996, Lockhart was invited to an artist residency in the Tokyo suburbs. During this period she regularly watched the routine practice sessions of the girls' basketball team at the local junior high school. In her six-part film Goshogaoka (1997), the continuous shot captures the movements of the participants, based on choreography created by Lockhart and the dancer Stephen Galloway. The players run towards and outside the frame, creating tension between the immobile camera and their moving bodies. The exhibition presents a series of photographs produced in parallel with the film. In these photographs the players appear fixed in static postures, seen from different perspectives.

Lockhart's photographs offer a sensitive and multi-layered social portrait, in which documentary values become inseparable from aesthetic ones. The artist ignores the familiar figures that accompany competitive sports – unruly fans, coaches giving orders, etc. Her images are emptied of the game's threatening competitive element, highlighting the players' individual personalities alongside solidarity and group cooperation. The players, though shy, seem natural and comfortable in the filmed social setting.

The project constitutes a planned and well-analyzed scientific ethnographic experiment. It proposes an idea that is revolutionary in its simplicity: women cooperating with each other can create a new entity – the group. The series of photographs, filmed at the girls' moment of puberty, inspires anticipation regarding their future. The viewers are invited to consider the meaning of feminine competitiveness in the framework of a shared lifestyle.

Sharon Lockhart was born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964. She lives and works in Los Angeles, USA