‘The Obliteration Room’
Yayoi Kusama
Dec 2014 -
Apr 2015
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When leading contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was a young girl, she started seeing the world through a screen of tiny dots. They covered everything she saw — the walls, ceilings, and even her own body. In her artwork, Kusama has used dots to cover many different surfaces and fill rooms. She calls this process 'obliteration', which means the complete destruction of every trace of something.
Children are invited to enter the world of the artist and 'obliterate' an Australian domestic space by adding colourful dot stickers to the white furniture, objects and surfaces in the large-scale interactive installation The obliteration room.
The obliteration room revisits the popular interactive children's project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery's fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2002. The 2014 installation coincides with the 'We can make another future: Japanese art after 1989' exhibition.
The obliteration room is a dynamic artwork transforming over time through the active participation of visitors. The changing nature of the room was documented through time-lapse photography.
Collection artworks featured in ‘The Obliteration Room’
Related exhibitions
![Works by Yasumasa Morimura, Masami Teraoka and Takashi Murakami installed for ‘We Can Make Another Future’ at GOMA, December 2014 / © The artists / Photograph: M Sherwood, QAGOMA](/system/files/styles/large/private/2024-01/GOMA_WeCanMakeAnotherFutureJapaneseArtAfter1989_20141216_msherwood_022%20%281%29.jpg?itok=Hwh2-noG)
‘We Can Make Another Future’
Sep 2014 - Sep 2015