Satoshi Hashimoto / Be Gone

“This is a sphere slightly smaller than the Earth”. 20th century / 2022. Sphere picked up on a riverbank

13 Jul – 11 Aug 2024

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Dates: July 13-August 11, 2024 (Closed: Tuesday and Wednesday) 13:00-20:00

Venue : Aoyama Meguro 2-30-6 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-0051

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AOYAMA | MEGURO is pleased to announce Satoshi Hashimoto’s solo exhibition “Be Gone,” opening July 13.

Since establishment, our gallery has committed to exploring plasticity of time and space through works regardless of media in an attempt to generate new forms of events. Having gone through the major pause and transformation of society due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have resumed our pursuit of this ideal even further.

This exhibition is a project best aligned with this new phase of the gallery.

Many of work by Satoshi Hashimoto have taken the form of instructions made up of short sentences, based on the fact that things we have around us for daily use have hidden instructions to choreograph people — for example, chairs say to us, “you can sit” or “sit.” In his work, Hashimoto has thrown light on such intrinsic choreographies that direct people at the unconscious level, presenting to the viewer various alternative, subversive possibilities. Installed in a public space, instructions like “Paint Yourself” and “You Can Hammer Yourself” do not only render the reader into the agent of the action in question but also their private territory, namely their body, into the target to apply the paint and destruct with the hammer, respectively, re-questioning the boundary between the public and private.

Beyond those instructions regarding objects in our immediate surroundings, Hashimoto’s gaze extends to the dynamics of economy and politics as well as the scales of meteorological phenomena and astronomical bodies. His works that deal with calendrical system and measurement of time, such as Two-day Week Calendar and Wednesday Becomes Extinct, not only reveal how our act of working and resting is secretly dictated by modern calendars but also suggests that even the Earth’s rotation is a hidden order that choreographs our life.

Hashimoto states that the subject that utters what his text says is actually the object to be handled. For example, it is the aerosol can that is the subject that pronounces the words “Paint Yourself.” In this context, it could be said that Plants used as materials curse humans to death is a work that clearly points to this relation between the text and the material object that is typical to his practice.

In recent years, Hashimoto has begun to employ for his short-sentence works a manner slightly different from his earlier instructions, categorizing some of them as “forecasts” or “pronouncements.” Installed in a large-scale exhibition setting in February 2024 (The beautiful, the ambiguous, and itself, kudan house, Tokyo, curated by Mizuki Endo), these works received a great response. This time, Hashimoto reconfigures the ensemble with newly produced works added. More than 30 works in total will unfold throughout the gallery as well as in the surrounding areas, expanding the space both inwardly and outwardly.

An Art User Conference, of which Hashimoto is a member, has for the last three years strenuously developed its activities focusing toward ‘outdoor’. The current exhibition illustrates how the collective’s pursuit of ‘outdoor’ in different places, including multiple locations in Aomori (Museum Composting Project, Aomori Museum of Art, 2021–2023), have influenced Hashimoto’s own artistic work in return. As the first collaboration between the artist and the gallery after Material Art Fair 2020 (Mexico City), which took place right before the pandemic, this is the third solo exhibition of Hashimoto with us, following I was Leonardo da Vinci. I sell my soul. I sell heaven. (2013) and The World’s Three Major Round Things: the Sun, the Moon, the Eye (2017).

Be Gone serves as a unique occasion to view Hashimoto’s latest body of work.

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Satoshi Hashimoto

Activities include The beautiful, the ambiguous, and itself (kudan house, Tokyo, 2024), Participatory Performative Workshop(Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, 2019), Kyojitsu-Hiniku (Japanese Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2018), Night – Time = Darkness (Hans & Fritz Contemporary, Barcelona, 2018), Everything and Others (LISTE, Basel, 2016), MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2016), Nation, Dice, Instruction (Daiwa Foundation, London, 2014), 14 Evenings (National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, 2012), Arbitrary Decisions and Prejudices: I Divide the Audience (National Art Center Tokyo, 2012), Sell Me Your Concept (multiple locations in India, 2011), and More of an Activity: The Artist as Choreographer (Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010), among others. Works also as a member of collectives, such as An Art User Conference.

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“Paint Yourself (Black)”.

2011 / 2016. Spray paint, instructions, visitors. Visitors can use spray paint placed in the venue to paint their bodies.

“Hanging Handcuffs”.

2016. Handcuffs, chain, visitors and passers-by. Visitors and passers-by can chain themselves using handcuffs hanging on the wall.

“A large amount of 1 yen coins: galaxy”.

1955 – / 2024. A large amount of 1 yen coins. You may take it away with you

“The body becomes immobile”.

2024. Body

“One day this stone shall shatter humanity”.

One day / 2022. Stone, humanity