Heso

Our practice begins by searching for the boundaries and blank spaces within the city. This exhibition, too, started from a casual conversation: we wanted to try showing only flat, two-dimensional works. So where would we show them? Rather than assuming a connection with a gallery, or looking for a rental gallery, we searched for a place slightly different from the outdoor sites we'd worked with so far — and arrived at Akasaka Community Center, located right in the heart of the city. We have continued a practice of bringing works to riverbanks, under bridges, and other places whose use is never quite fixed, temporarily raising up a "place" (ba) within them. Our project "Riverside pocket" and "Ba – junction –," held at PARCEL, extend from that same practice. Within a city, there are not only spaces that function like a navel — a center holding things together — but also hollows and pockets formed in its shadow, spaces whose use is never fully settled. What draws us in is the pleasure of exploring and digging into those hollows and pockets. A community center is a public facility used daily by local residents, yet rarely thought of as a space for exhibiting contemporary art. That very ambiguity, we feel, is exactly what makes it one of the city's remaining pockets. If we have the right to use it, we wanted to use it — that simple feeling is also where this exhibition began. This exhibition is not an attempt to propose some new format. It is an attempt to explore the hollows and pockets hidden within the city, and to temporarily raise up a "place" within one of them. Once the exhibition ends, this site will return to its everyday life. But if, in that short span of time, works and people intersect and this place appears just slightly different — even for a moment — then that experience should itself demonstrate the pleasure of digging out a pocket dormant somewhere within the city.