Koki Tanaka: A Vulnerable Narrator

After Wangechi Mutu (2010), Yto Barrada (2011), Roman Ondák (2012), Imran Qureshi(2013), and Victor Man (2014), Koki Tanaka (b. 1975, Tochigi) is now Deutsche Bank‘s sixth Artist of the Year. The award goes to contemporary artists who have created a substantial body of work, and in which works on paper and/or photography play a role.

Tanaka‘s Artist of the Year exhibition, A Vulnerable Narrator, at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin is a laboratory of sorts, one that ties together a decade’s worth of projects, ideas, and documents. It traces Tanaka’s path from early experiments with mass-produced goods and materials, to his collaborative actions and performances. Tanaka’s videos Everything Is Everything and Walking Through, are reminders of tests he conducted with objects bought in supermarkets and building supply stores. The objects in the videos, for which he developed new uses or combinations, became like improvised minimalist sculptures. But above all, Tanaka is interested in the question of how sensitive and open we are to the everyday objects that surround us, and how we might develop new relationships to them. He expanded this line of questioning to include interpersonal relationships and activities in 2010, with the performance A Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once. In the work, nine hairdressers were given the task of executing a group haircut to meet the wishes of one customer, an almost hopeless challenge and one that simultaneously brings Joseph Beuys’ term “social sculpture” to mind.

The artist calls these collective activities, which he began in 2012, Precarious Tasks. In them, participants are given rather poetic instructions on how they, as a group, are to carry out a simple task. With these acts, Tanaka further investigates the possibilities and impossibilities of communal cooperation. However, in 2011 when the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe shook the world, these everyday activities took on a political dimension. In the following year, Tanaka’s “Communal tea drinking” task instructed participants to bring tea to a gallery, where the combination thereof would be infused and then consumed by all those present. This was like a leap of faith, as a large part of the Japanese tea harvest comes from an area 200 km southwest of Fukushima, and was thus contaminated with radioactivity in 2011.

Address: Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin
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