Koki Tanaka: Provisional Studies: Action #5 Conceiving the Past, Perceiving the Present

A major new commission by Japanese artist Koki Tanaka, which will be his first solo exhibition in the UK.

Working with collaborative processes, Tanaka’s project departs from his curiosity about the local histories of The Showroom’s neighbourhood, Church Street. Through a series of collective actions involving a range of contributors, including local historians, senior citizens and school children, Tanaka suggests a composite approach towards how to read the present through the past, and about how these can be starting points for new social possibilities.

The staging of collective actions has been a central component of Tanaka’s work to date. Through sometimes seemingly absurd tasks – ranging from collective haircuts to piano playing and tea making – he develops scenarios where group dynamics and behaviours expose how multiplicity is a central part of contemporary experience. Tanaka sets up situations and allows them to play themselves out; believing that how we behave in a micro-society has implications for society has a whole.

At The Showroom he approaches the local vicinity as an archive of historical knowledge and events that retain a presence, and will summon these through communal actions and proposals in the lead up to and during the exhibition. Historical instances include the subversion of licensing laws when theatre goers had to swap buns for theatre tickets; brewing on the site of Paddington Green police station; the heavy bombing of the area in World War 2; the history of The Showroom’s building when occupied by the Palmer Tyre Company, who produced wheels, tyres, brakes and gun turrets for wartime fighter and bomber aircraft; and more recent histories of migration.