Aoyama Meguro is pleased to present Satoshi Hashimoto’s solo exhibition Write with Night, September 19–October 18 / A Name Is a Grave, October 18–September 19.
Through a wide range of forms, including performance and instruction-based works, Hashimoto has intervened in social institutions and modes of spectatorship, questioning the
assumptions and relations that underpin the world we take for granted. He identifies and brings to light choreographies embedded in everyday objects and public spaces that regulate
people’s behavior without their awareness. Such critical and political approaches, which hold the distinction between public and private realms in suspension, have been central to
Hashimoto’s practice.
Alongside these interventions into human behavior and social institutions, Hashimoto has also turned his attention to phenomena and structures at work in the world at different
scales, including celestial motion, weather, physical laws, and economic dynamics. Another approach that has become particularly pronounced in his recent practice shifts the speaking
subject from human beings to things themselves, presenting laws and phenomena latent in the world as short sentences that read as though those laws and phenomena were themselves issuing declarations.
The large-scale presentation of The Beautiful, the Ambiguous, and Itself, curated by Mizuki Endo at kudan house in 2024, marked a major turning point in Hashimoto’s practice. In works featuring short sentences such as “We have two eyes because we took one from someone else,” “At night, the sun that set below the horizon comes,” and “In the near future, all names will vanish / In the not-so-distant future, all substances will vanish,”
inquiries that had previously been dispersed across different forms and subjects were condensed into short sentences and brought forcefully to the fore, unsettling the scales and
categories of the world, as well as the very certainty of existence itself.
Two years on from his 2024 solo exhibition Be Gone, the present exhibition takes shape through two perspectives, Write with Night and A Name Is a Grave, with their respective dates running in reverse. Through a multilayered configuration that draws in space and time both within and beyond the gallery, a new exhibition is brought into being. We invite you to
experience Hashimoto’s new works and the ways in which they unfold.
数学の前提とされる「1=1」は、同一性の確認ではなく、同一化の開始である。異なるものを同じものとして扱うための、最初の偽装である。左側の1と右側の1は、同じ形に見えても同じものではない。それらは別の順序で現れ、別の位置に立つ。同じ形が繰り返されているように見えるだけで、そこにはすでに別々の出現がある。
にもかかわらず、数学はそれらを同じものとして扱う。そのとき差異は消えるのではない。問われないものとして退けられる。「1≠1」は「1≒1」へ縮められ、さらに「1=1」として固定される。等号はここで、二つのものの関係を示すだけでなく、差異を問わないための形式として働きはじめる。
この形式は数学の内部だけで完結しない。社会もまた、異なるものの差異を抱えたまま、それを問わない形式を設けることで作動している。貨幣は価値の差異を、所有はものとの関係を、名前は変わり続けるものを、記録や評価は複数の出来事を、交換可能で管理可能な形へ変える。その意味で社会は、「1=1」を反復する装置と言えるだろう。
しかし、そこで成立する同一性は自然にあるものではない。位置、接触、変化、ずれ、偶然は消えない。それらは同一性の背後へ退けられ、隠された差異として残り続ける。「現実」や「事実」もまた、固定された虚構の内側で成立している。それが反復され、事実のように扱われるとき、その虚構性は隠される。
虚構の側に置かれてきた文芸や芸術などといったものは、虚構をつくりながら、社会が現実として隠した虚構性に触れる。現実から離れるのではなく、現実がどのようにつくられ、どのように同一化され、どのように差異を沈黙させてきたのかを、あらわにする。
等号は中立な記号ではなく、差異を沈黙させる最小の社会装置である。「1≠1」は、等号が閉じようとする場所から、数えることそのものを揺るがしはじめる。一つと呼ばれるものは、世界から切り離された単位ではない。数とは、流れに停止を与えたことにする名である。
橋本聡
Born in 1977. His main exhibitions include “Can’t Go, Please Come” (ARCUS, Ibaraki, 2010), group exhibition “Omnilogue: Journey to the West” (Lalit Kara Academy, New Delhi, 2012), “Arbitrary Decisions and Prejudices: I Divide the Audience” (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2012), “False Name” (“14 Evenings,” The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2012), “I was Leonardo da Vinci. I sell my soul. I sell heaven.” (Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo, 2013), “Nation, Dice, Instruction,” (The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London, 2014), “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2016), “Everything and Others” (LISTE, Basel, 2016), and “Fw: Outside the Country (Japan-Malaysia)” (International airport, airplane, Malaysia, etc., 2016).In addition to his activities as a solo artist, Hashimoto actively conducts group activities in collaboration with other artists and critics, such as with An Art User Conference, Kiso Geijutsu – Contemporary Art Think-tank, and ARTISTS' GUILD.