Tonights presentation celebrates the joint opening of an exhibition of photography by Yuka Fujii at the Pocko Gallery, together with the UK premiere of LIKE PLANETS, a film of images and text taken from the book of the same name. There will also be live music from Clive Bell and Rie Nakajima.

The film makes its world premiere at the Punkt Festival in Norway in September 2019 followed soon after by this London showing. There are plans to take it to Japan later in the year. LIKE PLANETS also features a specially commissioned soundtrack by Mark Wastell.

SET I
CLIVE BELL

SET II
LIKE PLANETS FILM

SET III
RIE NAKAJIMA

Interval music from Phil Durrant

Like Planets, is a photographic essay by Yuka Fujii. Consisting of 5 chapters, spread over 170 pages, the book documents a seemingly quiet, intimate, existence in the company of her then partner, the artist, David Sylvian. Far from the world of popular music, the book reads like a visual poem of the time shared together. Sylvian is depicted in hotel rooms, small villages, graveyards, landscapes rural, exotic, and forbidding, before finally reaching a point of change, of grace, in the darkened rooms of Konya and Istanbul. Interspersed with poems and quotations, this is a tantalising and evocative glimpse of an intensely private life at a pivotal point in its evolution.

YUKA FUJII writes
The book Like Planets documents a period in time, between the early to late 1980s, in which David changed, rather rapidly, from well documented glamorous pop star to retiring spiritual aspirant. He no longer wished to be in the distorting existential glare of the spotlight and consequently set out on a personal journey of the interior, in search of what he believed to be the source of creative life; being the light derived from within. He’d often refer to it as the inexhaustible well of inspiration. You could quite reasonably argue that this was the first break he’d been afforded in adult life, an opportunity to reflect on where he’d come from and what truly mattered to him most, freely questioning his own moral and ethical dilemmas without the many external pressures to which he’d previously been subjected.

As I accompanied him on this journey, which was driven by both intellect and emotion, we also travelled long distances together. I always carry my camera with me so I was able to document in photographs, much to his reluctance and sometimes to his irritation, his mainly isolated longings, frustrations, and insights.

This volume primarily contains portraits of David in one form or another and these are coupled with seemingly simple images, sometimes symbolic, often impressionistic, that evoke a stillness of time and place. The frequent pauses made, the long drawn out emptiness of days that, in retrospect, reflect the seeming timelessness of the journey.

He and I were frequently like planets revolving around one another and, in some sense, this gravitational pull continues to this day.

http://davidsylvian.com/likeplanets/index.html
http://www.pocko.com
http://www.punktfestival.no