Mika Tajima

Mika Tajima employs sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance, often drawing on contradictions in modernist design and architecture to consider today’s regime of collaborative production. Connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, her work explores how the performing subject (e. g., speaker, dancer, designer, factory worker, musician, filmmaker) is constructed in spaces in which material objects outline action and engagement. Tajima also works collaboratively under the moniker New Humans, including on projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, and C. Spencer Yeh, among others.

Her Negative Entropy series (2014) consists of acoustic woven textile portraits derived from recordings of Toyota-powered Jacquard looms, an assembly line at a Toyota car factory in Japan, and a server colocation center. These recordings were transmuted into image files and physically interpreted by a weaving designer into a Jacquard fabric. The woven textiles were then stretched over custom acoustic panels, whereby they assume the function of sound-deadening tiles, similar to those used in recording studios to isolate sounds made by individual performers. Before Toyota began manufacturing cars, the company was built on the mechanization of the weaving process through the power loom and the streamlining of factory production in the early 20th century. To this day, Toyota continues to manufacture power looms alongside the production of cars, applying the principle of “jidoka”—the core of Toyota’s production method of lean manufacturing that defines the relationship between machines and workers (referred to as “automation with a human touch.”) With these works, Tajima reveals how the natural body comes in tension with the machinic body through the extreme control of time and space demonstrated by this global production system.

Tajima’s work has been shown internationally, at venues including Centre Pompidou in Paris, the South London Gallery in London, Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Sculpture Center and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, Bass Museum in Miami, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Courtesy of Art in General