Yurie Nagashima "Before the Dog, Behind the Cat"

This exhibition takes the archive as a starting point in examining how artworks are experienced over time and what they continue to represent for the artist. A museum is fundamentally an institution for recording and preserving. Yet records are never fixed; they change according to whose perspective selects them and how they are edited. Throughout her career, Yurie Nagashima has viewed photography not as evidence of events, but as traces generated through relationships. Through self-portraits and snapshots, she has documented the ever-changing nature of the self and others as they evolve over time. The exhibition consists of works from three series: ①A series presented at the 2025’s exhibition “Garage Sale", that features collages and drawings of cats onto earlier works. ②A series of street snapshots taken in 1994 while Nagashima was working part-time handing out tissue packets at the entrance to Shibuya Center-Gai. Presented here as a reference to MINA's location in Shibuya. ③A series of monochrome works (produced in 2018), created by making analogue prints from negatives the date of which are forgotten, mounted on plywood and transformed into tables for MINA. This is the first exhibition to bring together representative works from each decade - from the 1990s through the 2020s - in a single space, presented as an archive. What takes place here is not simply a re-exhibition of past works. Rather, the artist intervenes once again in documented images, layering a different time period upon them. Instead of remaining fixed as completed works from the moment they were first exhibited, they continue to be repeatedly edited and transformed, appearing before us as living, evolving entities. The photos are not merely objects for appreciation. By being touched and used, they become embedded in visitors' memories as physical, embodied experiences. Although the acquisition of artworks by museums is important in terms of preservation and recognition, the longer works remain unexhibited, the more they risk becoming detached from people's memories. In this sense, opportunities for change and renewal are lost, placing the works in a kind of suspended state. This exhibition is conceived as a living archive. It seeks to preserve the possibility for artworks to keep on changing. Through this practice, we explore the nature of documentation, and how artworks can continue to exist through time.