On Kawara

On Kawara’s One Million Years (Reading) is an installation taking place over the first three months of the Biennale di Venezia. The venue, the Oratorio di San Ludovico, Dorsoduro, is an old ecclesiastic building dedicated to the spoken word, and so could not be more suitable.

One Millions Years (Past and Future) are works with which the medium of typewritten text enters the realm of the sublime. With 20,000 pages, 500 years per page, one stretches backwards from the year in which it was made (1969) and the other forwards (from 1980), dedicated respectively “For all who have lived and died” and “ For the last one”. In 1993, Kawara transferred One Million Years from an exclusively written form to live readings and recordings, with one male and one female reader alternating. Each new reading continues in numerical order from the previous session. Dates are always read in English with readers engaged in a meditation on the nature of time.

On Kawara’s One Million Years (Reading) is supported by The Japan Foundation, David Zwirner, One Million Years Foundation and Stephen & Sigrid Kirk.