“Tokyo Art Meeting V: Seeking New Genealogies—Bodies/Leaps/Traces”

Under the general advising of Noh performer Mansai Nomura, this thematic exhibition bridges various cultures through an eclectic selection of works while also drawing on highlights from the museum’s collection. On view are three ways of framing the body as a writing (and written) device through time, space, image, and sound: dance as set of patterns (see Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company’s Wallflower, 2014); critiquing gesture as transparent expression of the soul (as in Atsuko Tanaka’s Work [Hoops], 1963, and Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s famed Zidane, a Twenty-first Century Portrait, 2006); and the critical interference of technological apparatuses in bodily communication, invoked for instance in Ka Fai Choy’s violent anthropological experiment via electric impulses in Prospectus For A Future Body, 2013.

For MEMORANDUM OR VOYAGE, 2014, the Kyoto collective Dumb Type presented new media performances from September 27 to November 16—OR, 1997, memorandum, 1999, and Voyage, 2002. All were remixed in a cutting-edge, high-definition projection that filled the galleries with a pulsating noise. The technological sublime is still on view here, though, and encountered in a video, Fencing × Technology, 2014, by Dentsu Lab Tokyo and Rhizomatiks, which shows the health monitoring of an athlete during competition. It is a work that seems ironically commented upon in Teppei Kaneuji’s deconstructive set design for Toshiki Okada’s play Impossible To Understand You. It’s Almost Like Electrical Devices, 2011.

Because the exhibition encompasses a wide array of works, visitors are left to experience its totality of fragments as if it were an interwoven quilt. In this regard, Sharon Lockhart and Noa Eshkol’s Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets, 2011, stands out, as it offers a comparative set of mapped rhythms and material textures rather than universal continuity to be deciphered.