Gohya Iijima and TARKY Toshima: “Match-Mismatch”

“When the body and spirit are in agreement, it is only about 6.3% of the time, while the remaining 93.7% is perhaps a state of not being in agreement.” The title of the exhibition came out of a conversation that was excessively fixated on those numbers.

The conversation carried a question: for many people, it is taken for granted that the two are in agreement from the start, but might they not actually be out of agreement more often than not? In agreement and out of agreement, various elements come into play, such as relationships with others, negotiations with the environment, and one’s relationship with oneself, none of which can be controlled by individual will. Those are the general conditions under which things do or do not agree.

Needless to say, there are many kinds of agreement and disagreement in the world, not only between body and spirit: body and place, transformation and continuity, seeing and remembering; the mismatch between the body as it exists now and desire; or the fluctuations between physically moving one’s body and the space surrounding it.

Agreement and disagreement cannot be strictly separated. There may be times when the boundary between what agrees and what does not reverses or wavers, appearing as an experience accompanied by shifts and slippages (we no longer know what percentage it is, though). (From the concept statement for Match-Mismatch.)