Satoshi Hashimoto Write with Night / A Name Is a Grave

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.