Simon Fujiwara was born in London in 1982, and spent his childhood moving between Japan, Europe, and Africa. He received a BA in architecture from Cambridge University in 2005 and earned an MFA from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2008. Fujiwara’s practice is markedly performative and interdisciplinary in nature, calling upon diverse disciplines and mediums as a means to both research and reinvent his own multilayered autobiography. Engineering complex narratives—both personal and political—Fujiwara’s art presents a profound inquiry into the nature of history, memory, and identity. Drawing on a constellation of diverse artifacts, locations, and events, his multimedia installations typically involve performance, music, architecture, lectures, and various literary forms, allowing for creative self-invention and an evolving exploration of his personal history. In an ongoing work titled Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2006–) the artist spins an elaborate fiction based on his family’s hotel and bar in 1970s Fascist Spain, which he recreated through a room-size mixed-media installation filled with myriad objects including stage props, toys, documentation, and artworks. The regime of General Franco was notorious for its censorship of pornography and homosexuality, and Fujiwara’s project, which has also included performance, offers a historical alternative to this suppression by reimagining his parents’ hotel as the site of illicit homoerotic adventures. Casting his father as the protagonist of this political-erotic narrative, Fujiwara obscures the facts by applying a fictional version of his family to a reimagined history. The artist manages to act as both the author and subject of his work, intimating the ways in which personal desire and political reality shape our memories and experience. In Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery) (2011), Fujiwara uses the craft of pottery as a means to mediate between the influence of family history and art history by tracing connections between his own estranged father and the so-called “Father of British Pottery” Bernard Leach. Leach was born to British parents in Hong Kong in 1887, and worked in Japan and China before moving to the UK in 1920, and the cross-cultural exchange between Eastern and Western traditions within his work powerfully resonated with Fujiwara. Consisting of a color video, two hammers, and framed photographs contained within a mounted wooden shelf, Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery) stages a dialogue between the artist and his father—played by an actor—in which they recount the shared experience of creating a tea set in the style of Leach. The video’s narrative weaves fact and fiction together, suggesting that both history and identity are fictional constructions, and the final gesture in which the tea set is smashed symbolizes the liberating destruction of both the artist’s biological and artistic father. Fujiwara has had solo exhibitions at Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2011); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2012); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge (2014). His work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including Home is the Place You Left, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway (2008); I knOw yoU, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2013); and Roppongi Crossing 2013: OUT OF DOUBT, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013). His work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale (2009), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Gwangju Biennial (2012), Shanghai Biennial (2012), and Sharjah Biennial (2013). Fujiwara has received numerous honors including the Rome Scholarship, British Academy, Rome (2005); the Iaspis Residency, Gothenburg, Sweden (2010); the Bâloise Art Prize (2010); and the Cartier Award (2010). He lives and works in Berlin.