小坂美鈴

Misuzu Kosaka

Misuzu Kosaka continues to reclaim, within her own hands, the time of private life and bodily sensibility that have been neglected through labor. The artist’s practice involves cutting photographs of domestic interiors and re-weaving them into forms that assume bodily poses.The venue for this exhibition is Kyodo Shoko, a shared archive that opens private book collections to the public as both a reading room and a project space. The space woven from Kosaka’s fragmentary bodily works and the materials circulating within Kyodo Shoko emerges as a single totality, embodied in the exhibition title Corpus. The term corpus, originally a French word referring to a body of documents or letters assembled for study, derives etymologically from the Latin corpus, meaning “body.” By reading the site as though anatomizing a plural space composed through assemblage, viewers gradually perceive the quiet loosening of the mobility that resides within their own bodies.

In his book “Peace and Foolishness,” Hiroki Azuma emphasizes the importance of thinking while also pointing out the limits of rational judgment and moral correctness that human beings are capable of assuming. When the pressure to be “intelligent” becomes excessive, people retreat, losing the capacity to experience peace. Taking up this discussion, the present exhibition reflects on the notion of “not thinking.” This is not an abandonment of thought, but an attempt to seek a margin in which thinking does not excessively constrain the body. In producing an exhibition—and in organizing projects within a space that holds books—this margin is understood as one possible form of a place to live, a site in which one may freely come undone.