Tsuneko Taniuchi

Tsuneko Taniuchi (谷内恒子 Taniuchi Tsuneko), born in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo, Japan, in 1946, is a contemporary artist, who uses performance as her main medium. Her practice, which oscillates between scripted situations and participatory works, aims to question cultural, social, and sexual constructions, linked to notions of identity, immigrations, and feminism. After studying 20th-century Western art history and sociology at the of Kobe Jogakuin, Japan, Tsuneko Taniuchi studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (France) for two years between (1970–1972). From 1983 to 1987, she travelled extensively between New York, Paris, and Japan (Kobe, Tokyo), before settling permanently in France in 1987. Her early works focused first on paintings, and then on installations, including photographs, and videos. In 1995, she began her performance work, which she sees as a series of "micro-events." This term refers to the personal dimension of her actions, in relation to contemporary society and politics, in which she is generally the main performer alone or she directs a team of often female dancers, performers, actors, etc. The situations she sets up are the result of an intersection between the viewer, the art work and the artist with political and social questioning. Initiated in 2002 at the Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris. Since 2002, the date France adopted the PACS - Civil Solidarity Pact, allowing same-sex couples to embrace a form of union close to civil marriage, Taniuchi has developed a new series of Micro-Events called "Micro-Events/Weddings." Their aim is to question, through a variation of contexts, the social norms surrounding marriage; to this date, she has "married" more than two hundred ninety people, men, women, all sexes and genders, and sometimes with several people at once. A selection of her performance series of her micro-events from 1995 to 2010, were exhibited at Le Générateur in 2011. The exhibition was conceived as a retrospective of the forty-one micro-events, created since 1995.