ART CITIES:Tokyo-Reciprocal Reliance
The group exhibition “Reciprocal Reliance” reflects on our era of diversity, in which every city develops and shares its own culture, a system of values and aesthetics. Welcoming promising artists and a curatorial collective based in Paris, it seeks for a point of cultural relevance which resonates with the art scene here in Tokyo today.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Scai The Bathhouse Archive
The exhibition “Reciprocal Reliance” develops as a scenario of interconnections in which the artists’ works exist symbiotically. By creating a system of mutual interactions and dependencies, the exhibition aims to question the structure and survival of an ecosystem, through the presentation of a multi-layered hybrid installation that interweaves sculpture, sound, moving images, synthetic, mineral and organic material together. The title, “Reciprocal Reliance,” highlights the collaborative approach during the creative process that was the central foundation in creating the exhibition: the artists work on a shared installation, in which each work simultaneously exists as a single entity and as a part of a broader environment. The ecosystem of the exhibition relies on an inclusive and trustful approach towards artistic creation that lays the bases for an open-ended dialogue among its components and shows how vulnerable relationships among living organisms can be. Flourishing like a plant that embraces the external world, the installation adapts its needs to the surrounding context without any attempt to transform it. The exhibition space displays an artificial landscape inspired by the essential forms of a natural environment. The immersive dimension of the installation engages the audience in a physical and psychological experience in which the three artistic practices engender different sets of questions about the relations between living and non-living entities, or about human presence and its absence. Anne-Charlotte Yver’s works embody the exoskeleton of the installation that maintains the complex system of elements together. Her plexiglass and steel structure evokes a twilight zone in which something has either just happened or is about to happen. The suspension of the components and their transparency increases the fragile dimension of the work, establishing vertical and horizontal lines within the exhibition. The series of suspended sculptures is reminiscent of the traces of a moulting process in which an insect, in order to reach the final state of its metamorphosis, develops new cuticles by abandoning the old ones, emphasising the absence of a body and its future projection at the same time. Enzo Mianes combines volumes and bi-dimensional objects fostering a parallel between human and nature. The plexiglass showcase grows up from the floor like a stalagmite, creating a tension with Anne-Charlotte Yver’s horizontal structure. Filled with soil sourced locally near the gallery, the work has been devised to contain a human body, eventually replaced by organic and mineral materials. Through this work, the artist crystallizes the ultimate reappropriation of the environment by nature, expressing a radical break with the asymmetries between container and contents. The disk, symbol of perfection and infinity, aims at manifesting the capture of a moment, the point of origin of the work’s creation. Like a gash on the outside world, Anne-Charlotte Finel’s videos visually extend the limits of the scenery and engage the viewer in a profound contemplation of an elsewhere. The fragile texture of the images, resulting from an alteration of colours, claims the vulnerable tension between dark and light, calmness and instability, survival and destruction, which characterises both terrestrial existence and cosmic space. A synthetic sound flows from multiple sources and pervades each element of the show, acting like an amniotic fluid.
Info: Curators: Curatorial Collective Curate It Yourself, Scai The Bathhouse, Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 25/1-23/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.scaithebathhouse.com
