Cast off skin (OFF) and put on something (ON)

Toshima curated the exhibition, presented a video work as O,1,2nine (TARKY Toshima + Masayuki Yoshida), and streamed a performance of their comedy sketch online.

For Stick and Rapel, a monitor was installed over an opening in the gallery floor leading down to the basement space. The work was also filmed in the same gallery. Its main feature is a dialogue between a mummy emerging from the opening and an interlocutor on the other side of the camera. Occasionally, a screen displaying text alone appears, but the dialogue continues uninterrupted. The video work consists of two scenes.

In the first scene, a conversation unfolds about how yogurt seems to fall somewhere between eating and drinking, memories of the Silk Road from a time when cattle were raised there, and the whiteness and brightness of space. The speaking mummy loosely references the figure known as the “Beauty of Loulan,” a mummy discovered in 1980 at Loulan, an ancient city along the Silk Road.

In the next scene, a man asks for directions, and the mummy responds. Their conversation comes apart at the joints, touching on artificial breasts, routes along the Silk Road, and sticking together and repelling one another.

On the final day of the exhibition, the comedy sketch ↗○∞○+ — The End of Summer Edition —, filmed in the same gallery, was also streamed online. Through recollections, memories, letters, and other elements, the relationships between the individual sketches and their narrative connections shift and become unstable, even as the episodes continue one after another. Naturally, since the sketch was performed and filmed in the very space where the exhibition was being held, the works on display and the gallery space itself were incorporated into the comedy.

(From the press release announcing the exhibition)

This exhibition takes as its themes “the cast-off shell, or the act of wearing something” and “the space between concealing one's identity and casting something off.” It is also an o-giri. A cast-off shell is something that was once oneself, or once something other than oneself. It can also be an imitation of a surface, or a past that persists as a foreign body. To wear something, meanwhile, refers to the reorganization and transformation of identity, or the act of becoming something else. The o-giri referred to here includes a process in which participating artists consider the prompt expressed by the exhibition title and present their responses as artworks.

By making visible how an exhibition takes shape through improvised responses to given conditions, this also serves as a method for bringing a certain wit and critical edge to relationships such as those between artists and artworks, and between exhibitions and their curation. The term o-giri originally referred, in early modern kabuki, to a concluding act performed after the main performance, featuring improvisational entertainment or comedy. A streamed performance of the comedy sketch ↗○∞○+ — The End of Summer Edition — by O,1,2nine (TARKY Toshima + Masayuki Yoshida) is also planned as a related event for this exhibition. Responding to a prompt, shedding one's skin, putting something on, switching between “ON” and “OFF.” In other words, this exhibition also brings into focus “acts (and their forms).” By directing attention not only to artworks displayed as finished results, but also to the acts involved in their making, or to artworks as acts in themselves, the problematique of performativity in art may also come into view. Look forward to it!

This curated exhibition itself, together with o-giri, an important theme of the exhibition, and the relationships among artists, exhibitions, works, and curation, were explored further at the Symposium Commemorating the Publication of “Takayuki Toshima Selected Works”, held in 2023, where Toshima revisited them and other guests discussed them as well. The full symposium can be read as “Nonsense =≠ Logic and Form” (in Japanese), an event commemorating the publication of Takayuki Toshima Selected Works, with Takuma Ishikawa, Takeshi Ueda, Hiroko Tasaka, and TARKY Toshima.

Cultural and Linguistic Notes for English Readers

1. O-giri: Comedy Built Around a Prompt

O-giri is a format of Japanese variety comedy in which performers respond to a given prompt, often with a witty or unexpected answer. The exhibition adopts this structure: participating artists consider the theme expressed in the exhibition title and respond by making and exhibiting artworks.

The press release also describes the term's historical use in kabuki, where it referred to a concluding act featuring improvisation or comedy. Here, o-giri refers to both a form of performance and a way of organizing an exhibition around responses to a shared prompt.