Mika Tajima

Mika Tajima received her MFA in 2003 from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York, NY. After completing her BA (Fine Arts/East Asian Studies) in 1997 from Bryn Mawr College, PA she was accepted into The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s (FWM) Apprentice Training Program as a Post-Graduate Apprentice. In 2011, Tajima was invited to begin an Artist-in-Residence with FWM, 14 years after her original apprenticeship.
Mika Tajima employs sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance, often drawing on contradictions in modernist design and architecture to consider how the performing subject (e. g., speaker, dancer, designer, factory worker, musician, filmmaker) is constructed in spaces in which material objects outline action and engagement. Tajima’s most recent work extends her interrogation of the built environment and the maximized performer to the global flow of life energies sought by unraveling systems. Tajima also works collaboratively under the moniker New Humans, including on projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, and C. Spencer Yeh, among others.
Tajima’s work has been shown internationally, at venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; South London Gallery, London; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.