November 5th – December 15th, 2024
Open: Wed.-Fri. 13:00-19:00 / Sat.& Sun. 12:00-18:00
Closed: Mon.,Tue. and National holiday
Opening reception: Sat. November 9th, 17:00-19:00
　

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MUJIN-TO Production is pleased to present “Altar,” an exhibition by Meiro Koizumi.

In recent years, Meiro Koizumi has explored the mechanical nature of the human cognitive system through the themes of hypnosis and virtual reality, creating a new vision in which machines and humans merge.

While Koizumi has been focused his expression on video, this exhibition will feature new sculptures that connect the human body with everyday objects, furniture, and machine parts, as well as paintings and prints based on historical photographs documenting hypnosis in the 19th century.

Through the medium of sculpture, Koizumi is attempting to move to the next stage of experimentation, questioning the materiality of the body, which is the essence of the body, and wondering, “Has the human body been converted into data and patterns and objectified in exchange for progress and development throughout history?”

We hope this exhibition will give you an opportunity to think how we can recover the essence of our original raw experience and the rich space of humanity from our bodies, which have been reduced to objects, and feel the sense of foreboding for the future that Koizumi presents.

This is Koizumi’s first solo exhibition at MUJIN-TO Production in five years, revealing his new works that will lead to overseas projects for the next year.
　
　
[Artist Statement]
The discovery of the unconscious led human beings to understand that mental activity is rooted in a mechanism that lies outside the conscious mind. When our perceptions are manipulated while under hypnosis, we seem to become a machine, absent of free will.

Further research on DNA structure and brain function has also taught us that a regulated mechanical system is buried deep within the human body. And today, due to the development of generative AI, we are confronted with the fact that language, once thought to form the basis of intellectual activity, is simply an enormous sequence of data.

Thus, greater advances in human understanding and technology are accompanied by the increasing view that human beings are little more than machines or sequences of data. Yet, the entire reality of our lives cannot be digitized. At times, I am overcome with anxiety at the thought that the things that resist digitalization are apt to be excluded from our tech-centric future precisely because they cannot be digitized.

The ancient Greek god Prometheus, the progenitor of modern technology, was chained to a rock and subjected to eternal suffering for stealing fire (technology) from the gods and giving it to humanity. This heroic act of self-sacrifice, for which we are forever indebted, lies at the heart of human progress. Perhaps, throughout history, it is our bodies that we have attempted to offer in return.

War violently changes our bodies to objects and images. Brainwashing and propaganda turn our bodies into docile machines. Racism transforms the bodies of others into indifferent objects, and AI reduces our bodies to data and patterns. Over the centuries, we have sacrificed something vital within ourselves to a higher power for the sake of convenience and progress. You might say that rational modernity is just another name for this grand ritual. War may also be part of this practice. And abstract art might well be the religious art used to ornament such ceremonies.

Our challenge is to resist these powerful forces and reclaim the essence of our lives, which can never reduced to commodities, objects, images or patterns. These essences are destined to be excluded from progress as they have no definite form or representation.

But art is the practice of giving form to the formless. My greatest personal challenge is to restore a rich and complex living space within the body, which has been reduced to nothing more than an object.

November 2024
Meiro Koizumi
　

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Sculpture Production

Production Supervisor: Daisuke Ida

Production members:
Masato Ishige
Akinobu Hadano
Keiichiro Saito
Yuiko Yamada
Sana Aihara
Ayumu Yamada
Riku Ono