2020年にウィーンのアートセンターdas weisse hausでの個展「2017年10月1日よりオーストリアでは覆面禁止です」の様子をまとめた記録冊子。オーストリアに住む元難民に市内警備を依頼した様子を映像にまとめたことで、中心に白人優位なオーストリア社会に眼差しを向けた新作コミッション作品「移民たちがこの国を防衛しています」（2020年）を中心に、グラーツで実施した「私的空間からアドルフ・ヒットラーを引き摺り出す」（2018年）のウィーン版などの様子を収録。 『2017年10月1日よりオーストリアでは覆面禁止です』 ソフトカバー、中綴じ、A5サイズ, 40ページ, 4C印刷, 13カラー写真, 1モノクロ写真 2020年4月4日発行 企画：丹羽良徳, das weisse haus テキスト執筆：Enar de Dios Rodriguez（das weisse haus） 以下は展覧会リリースより。 Solo exhibition “FROM 1 OCTOBER 2017: FACE COVER BAN IN AUSTRIA” by Yoshinori Niwa Duration: January 29 – April 04, 2020 Opening: January 28, 2020, 7pm In a time when populism and right-wing movements are rising all over the world and new laws promoting discrimination and restricting freedom are being passed, this exhibition aims to examine the prevailing conditions and power relations occurring in public space. The title of the show refers to a law passed by the Austrian government that bans full-covered faces in the public space. With the use of irony and the factual activation of utopian gestures, “AB 1. OKTOBER 2017: VERBOT DER GESICHTSVERHÜLLUNG IN ÖSTERREICH” touches upon a wide range of intertwined topics related to politics, immigration, historical memory and identity formation. This show presents a newly commissioned body of work titled “Immigrants are Guarding This Country” (2020), which is spread through the first two exhibition rooms of das weisse haus in the form of installations with a wide variety of media: video, text and photography. With this project, created in collaboration with former refugees and asylum seekers living in Austria, the artist explores the possibilities of a multi-directional society in which those who have been a target of monitoring by the authorities take the role of the ones who watch and protect the country. Similarly, this interdisciplinary body of work refers to different labour conditions, emphasizing working spaces with the use of architectural constructions and site-specific adjustments. Next to the previous installations another recent work titled “Manifesting a Newspaper” (2020) is showcased, consisting of a series of 24 drawings on Austrian newspapers (Wiener Zeitung and Kurier) in which propaganda style texts written by Yoshinori Niwa or copied from Japanese newspapers cover the pages. These texts, however, are not just readable —in both German and Japanese— but are also available to be heard in English— through an audio guide that the artist has created for the piece. Yoshinori Niwa’s first solo show in Austria also gathers older video works from his prolific artistic practice. Chronologically displayed in old TV monitors, the self-defining titles of these documented performances speak by themselves: “Walk in the Opposite Direction of a Demonstration Parade” (2011), “Going to San Francisco to Dispose of My Garbage” (2006), or “Transferring Puddle A to Puddle B” (2004). In the first video, Yoshinori Niwa walks alone and in the opposite direction of a political protest in Tokyo against japanese nuclear energy policies, a demonstration that took place after the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The next video shows how the artist travels with a plastic bag full of his garbage from Tokyo to the Bay Area in order to dispose it in San Francisco, thus alluding in an ironic way to the global movement of discarded materials. The last video piece in the exhibition is one of Yoshinori Niwa's first artworks, created when he was still an art student, and it's a record of the artist transferring with his mouth the water from one puddle located in the Eastern side of Berlin to another puddle in the Western side of Berlin. Two more recent artworks are integrated in “AB 1. OKTOBER 2017: VERBOT DER GESICHTSVERHÜLLUNG IN ÖSTERREICH”: the neon piece “Towards a Beautiful Country” (2017) —which refers to the title of a best-selling propaganda book by Shinzo Abe— and “Withdrawing Adolf Hitler from a Private Space” (2018). This last piece, which was commissioned and produced by the festival steirischerherbst'18, is a black container into which any relics from the nazi era can be dumped. The position of this work, installed at the outdoor lawn of das weisse haus, refers back to one of the common threads within Yoshinori Niwa’s artistic practice, as well as to the title of this exhibition: the tensions and interplays between the private and the public spheres. realized with a grant by Pola Art Foundation