Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures. Tanaka’s visceral and physical reactions to various circumstances within the video reflect the artist’s own perceptual relationship to that space.
Koki Tanaka is part of a generation of Japanese artists whose work responded to the economic recession and limited opportunities that beset their country in the early 2000s. Instead of creating monuments, these artists focused on everyday life, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary by stimulating moments of perceptual awakening. Their social critique was enacted through the spectacular and unexpected combination of materials, humor, and simple actions. Working primarily with found objects and video, Tanaka’s practice reveals hidden links between object and action.
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia...
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...