MIKA TAJIMA

Through her multidisciplinary practice spanning performance, sculpture, painting, and installation, Tajima takes upquestions of identity and agency in a world increasingly influenced and mitigated by technology. Drawing on variouspoints of reference—including quantum mechanics, Hannah Arendt’s writings on the nature of freedom,and Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity and the body as a vexed relation—the artist imbues her work acrossmediums with scientific and philosophical import. At the center of Tajima’s practice are her investigations of theways that different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as intertwined material, perceptual, and psychicexperiences.

Her upcoming exhibition at Pace’s New York gallery takes its title from a segment of physics focused on flows andtransformations of energy. Enactments of glowing, burning, blooming, and dying will recur across the gallery space,which, in Tajima’s hands, becomes a stage for spiritual and physical transfigurations, traversing digital and ancienttemporalities. The acute shifts in the sizes of the works in the show—in relation to human scale—draw attention toour staggeringly infinitesimal existence in the context of geologic and technological time. With her new works, theartist invites questions of what it means to be an individual within this deep time continuum and, in thiscontemporary moment, amid the inexorable rise of big data.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will first experience a scent—which incorporates various ingredients used inancient Mesopotamian divination practices—emitted from a pyramidal incense sculpture in Tajima’s exhibition.Initiating viewers into the presentation, this ambient olfactory element serves to open the mind and to remind one ofexistence through the senses.

Anchoring the show are new, large-scale textile paintings from the artist’s ongoing Negative Entropy series. For thisbody of work, the artist has worked with neurosurgeons specializing in repairing the brain through energeticstimulation and activation. Auditory maps of the brain’s activity are translated into visual representations of soundwaves (spectrograms) to which Tajima assigns colors. The latest Negative Entropy compositions—produced incollaboration with an experimental textile lab in the Netherlands—are rendered at an entirely new, expansive scale.

As such, these woven spectrograms, forged from virtually imperceptible records of brain activity, speak to theexpansiveness of human potential.

Tajima will also present Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States) as part of Energetics—a portrait of thenational sentiment in the United States on January 1, 2023, compressed within a 5d memory crystal. To create thiswork, the artist collected data from social media on that day, analyzing the sentiments of text-based posts byAmerican users. Made with optoelectronics technology, the massive amount of data is represented as 24 smallsquares within a cloud image and inscribed into a tiny disc-shaped optical crystal, which balances atop rose quartz.Captured and locked away forever, the data laser etched within the image of the cloud becomes a memorial of sorts,an ode to the abstract, intangible nature of our digital selves.

Three rose quartz sculptures from Tajima’s Pranayama series, a body of work in which the artist has pierced wood ormarble surfaces with bronze nozzles cast from real Jacuzzi jets, will be included in the exhibition as well. Thelocations of punctures in the stones are loosely based on diagrams of bodily pressure points for acupuncturetreatment, a traditional wellness technique used to control and direct unknowable life force. With her new rose quartzPranayama sculptures, Tajima taps into the material’s associations with new age beliefs and aesthetics as well as itsability to produce electrical reactions. Meditating on mysterious flows and releases of energy in bodies, objects, andspaces, these practices that expose interiority and systematize abstract life functions are analogous to technology’simperative to understand, regulate, and shape human activity.

New sculptural works that incorporate live flowers also explore these ideas of life energy and breath. Transfused withUV fluorescence, the flowers will glow in the exhibition, emitting light as they die. For Tajima, the ephemeral andperformative dimensions of these works reflect the constantly fluctuating state of the natural, built, and digitalworlds that we inhabit and create.

Following her exhibition with Pace, Tajima will present Super Natural, a solo exhibition at the Hill Art Foundation inNew York, in May 2024. Her work will also be included in Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice, the HammerMuseum’s forthcoming Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Los Angeles, co-curated by Mika Yoshitake and GlennKaino and opening in September 2024.

Mika Tajima: Energetics is realized with support from Professor Peter Kazansky (University of Southampton), Dr.Amanda Carpenter, Textiel Lab, TAE Technologies, Seishoji Temple, Obayashi Corp., and Brooklyn Research.