February 2023

Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan as part of the Frieze Los Angeles, Frieze Projects: the exhibition Against the Edge brings the work of contemporary artists into dialogue with cultural sites across the Westside, unearthing narratives of liberation and creativity as well as exile and occlusion. Against this backdrop and our historic landmark works by Kelly Akashi will be exclusively displayed at Villa Aurora.

Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.

Lion Feuchtwanger, Vom Sinn des historischen Romans, 1935

Against the Edge brings together three recent sculptures by the Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Kelly Akashi in the historic setting of Villa Aurora. Located in the garden, salon, and courtyard of the storied residence, the trio of works speaks to many of Akashi’s sculptural and conceptual concerns—how materials encode presence and absence, flowers as a marker of ephemerality, and cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The installation also evokes an historical parallelism between Akashi’s family story and the journey of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, Villa Aurora’s earlier owners.

Akashi’s family story resonates in history with the story of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, the former owners of Villa Aurora. Shortly after Akashi’s paternal family was forced into the American concentration camp at Poston in the early 1940s, Villa Aurora was purchased by German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta after they escaped the Camp des Milles concentration camp in southern France. Villa Aurora would become a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing the genocide in Europe. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schönberg, and others gathered at Villa Aurora as it became a site for intellectual reorganization in the wake of modernity’s greatest rupture.

In late 2022, Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, The Oppermanns, was rereleased by Simon & Schuster. In the novel, Feuchtwanger foreshadows the Holocaust years before it begins, writing contemporaneously with the rise of Naziism and the demise of the Weimar Republic. The story follows a Jewish bourgeois family in Berlin as it confronts the rise of Hitler and antisemitism and their eventual internment in a concentration camp. Despite selling over a quarter of a million copies worldwide in 1933, the U.S. remained on the sidelines for almost a decade before intervening in Europe while simultaneously adopting the use of concentration camps for its Japanese-American citizens.

Exhibiting the work of Kelly Akashi, whose practice has engaged deeply with the site of the Poston Internment Camp, at Villa Aurora folds history in on itself. Histories that mirror from opposite sides of an ocean can inform each other and present the all-too-human weakness, horror, and resilience birthed out of hatred, insecurity, and prejudice.

To read the complete Against the Edge text and learn about other sites and artists included in Frieze Projects curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan and Del Vaz Projects, click here.

Material tactility, its possibilities, limitations, and transformation form the core of Kelly Akashi's practice. Originally trained in analog photography, traditional processes and the materiality of documents continue to inform and fuel her sculptural explorations. Working in a variety of media, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Akashi investigates the capacity and boundaries of these elements and their ability to construct and challenge conventional concepts of form.

In her sculptural practice, Akashi utilizes indexical materials to emphasize the impressionability and physicality of objects. Often pairing delicate hand-blown glass or hand-made wax candles with bronze casts of her own hands, the artist captures momentary gestures, casting them into perpetual existence. Her interest in the mapping of time has led her to study fossils from extinct species in order to locate humankind amongst other consciousness that have thrived along the earth’s geological timeline. Drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses, Akashi aims to capture the tension and physicality of objects in her practice.

Visits by appointment only. Booking is required as capacity is limited.

ABOUT FRANZ KAFKA 

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes. 

ABOUT THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA

An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. "This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us...the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet." —Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities.

Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.