T-Shirt
Richard Hawkins

Kunsthalle Wien has produced this special T-Shirt for the first exhibition of Richard Hawkins in Austria. It features the work Ankoku 16 (Danae) based on research on the work of the choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (b. 1928, Akita, Japan; d. 1986, Tokyo), who is credited as being the founder of the dance form Butoh. From the 1960s Hijikata complied Butoh-fu scrapbooks combining newspaper clippings, photographs, images of artworks and dance notations within a semi-methodical approach to choreographing movement. Hawkins’s series of Ankoku collages from 2012 employ asymmetric grids in which textual fragments, appropriated images and scraps of kraft paper are arranged in rhythmic intervals of an incantatory character. The works invite the viewer into a shared game of refined voyeurism, challenging us to identify iconic artworks by artists including Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer and Francis Bacon and partake in the perverse poetic logic that Hawkins attributes to the Japanese choreographer.