TETSUO’S BODY

We are excited to invite you to “Tetsuo’s Body”, a collective exhibition curated by Andrea Samory, Italian artist and architect based in Tokyo. On display there will be sculptures and graphic art by five artists from Europe and Japan.
“We live in an age of collective hysteria. Dreams and anxieties for the distant future are unrealistically superimposed onto contemporary events. As a result, the younger generations grew up always feeling at the verge of either an astounding technological breakthrough and/or an historical catastrophe.
“Tetsuo’s Body” is an exhibition on the material reality of our hysterical future imaginary: what is the shape and the flesh of our imagined destiny – disregarding whether it is a dystopia or utopia?”

Artists:

Michele Bazzoli
https://www.instagram.com/michele_bazzoli/

Matteo Gatti
https://matteogatti.tumblr.com/

Ayako Hirogaki
https://www.instagram.com/ayako_hirogaki/

Francesco Pacelli
https://www.francescopacelli.com/

Andrea Samory
https://www.instagram.com/andrea.samory/

Tetsuo’s Body
23rd Oct- 27th Oct 2019
open 11:00-18:00 (last entry 17:00)
entrance fee ¥400~ (one drink included)

The advance ticket is available here: withfriends.co

CRITIC’S STATEMENT:

Marcello Barison http://www.marcellobarison.com/biography/
Artist and Philosopher. Assistant Professor in Philosophical Perspectives at the University of Chicago.

We live in an age of collective hysteria.
We are not able to envision our future because in our minds it’s going to be either nuclear holocaust and environmental disaster, or fully automated, AI-fueled technological revolution and space exploration. There is no middle ground, and this is partly due to the way media shaped our lives.
The Millennial generation grew up feeling always at the verge of either an astounding technological breakthrough and/or an historical catastrophe. We’ve been hysterically superimposing our dreams for the distant future onto our contemporary events. In other words, our social mood is: “Imagine how amazing the robots in the future will be – hoping that WWIII doesn’t start in 5 years and the Earth doesn’t die of overheating”.
This sense of anticipation parallels the addictive surge of adrenaline that we feel when watching an horror movie: it doesn’t matter whether the faith of the protagonists is grim or bright – what matters is the excitement itself, the cathartic sense of power given by the unfolding of unsettling events. The movie genre of Body Horror perfectly visualizes the state of hysteria the youngest generations are addicted to. Among many others, Akira by Otomo, and Tetsuo the Ironman by Tsukamoto (both released at the very beginning of the Millennial cohort) take place in dystopian futures where humans and machines are physically impossible to distinguish. These movies focus on the search for ultimate power and the physical adulteration of the “natural” as inevitable traits of human society.
“Tetsuo’s Body” is an exhibition our hysterical vision of the future, and it focuses on the material reality of it: what is the shape and the flesh of our imagined futures – disregarding whether they are dystopias or utopias?
The exhibition takes place in Tokyo, which is in itself a visual “post-utopia”. The city has been expanding and advancing at an arguably never-seen-before pace for around 40 years, yet it now starts to feel like a big old concrete blob.. the materialization of a future that was imagined in the past.
Whithin this evocative context, the sculptures arise as inevitable anomalies linked to overproduction and hybris of endless expansion (“The cancerous Body without Organs is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern”, A thousand plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari). They can be seen as the embodiment of nowadays’ inability of excluding anxiety and hysteria from our future visions. Exactly how a human organ subject to a constant state of inflammation is scientifically more likely to develop a tumor, Tokyo’s pristine synthetic surfaces are suddenly juxtaposed with goopy formations and naturally-arisen synthetic objects. The works of art in this display are mostly non-figurative, and uncanny in a deeply enigmatic sense. Even so, the exhibition openly refers to the monstrous natural/artificial hybrid characters that so heavily influenced the younger generations’ imagination through cinema, art and printed media.