MITSUKO MIWA

The title of this exhibition is drawn from the one-second adjustment to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), often applied to it in order to accommodate the difference between a ‘precise time’, measured by atomic clocks, and the ‘imprecise’, observed solar time that varies due to irregularities and the long-term slowdown in the rotation of the Earth. Miwa claims the space of a ‘leap second’ within the chronology of the multiple histories of art. She reminds us with grace, wit, lightness, and tactility of the structural irregularities and slowdowns these histories undergo.

The work of Mitsuko Miwa materialises in drawings, paintings and objects, but also anything else that comes to her mind—an infinitely varied output. Wary of given categories or styles, her understanding of identity is something fluid, transient and ephemeral. Her practice can be understood as a phenomenological set-up of perception: the act of looking seems to be at the centre of the work of the artist, pointing to the tension in language between materiality and meaning and the precariousness of any form of semantic construction.