Body, Space & Reality: Taro Izumi

My eyes are not in the centre was Taro Izumi’s first UK solo exhibition, presented at White Rainbow in Fitzrovia, London, in 2018. Featuring entirely new work, the exhibition explored how technology mediates perception and transforms direct experiences into images and recordings.

Through video, installation and performance, Izumi examined the relationship between lived and mediated experience. Everyday actions were recorded, isolated and reassembled, turning familiar objects and situations into strange and often absurd scenes. His installations combined moving images with architectural interventions, creating unexpected interactions between physical space and projected imagery.

Works included a bartender repeatedly chiselling a block of concrete and a simulated beach scene illuminated by five projectors, populated by artificial fruit and synthetic materials. The exhibition also explored drone technology through a ‘human drone’: a performer equipped with a GoPro camera attached to a prosthetic hand, who entered otherwise inaccessible gallery spaces at visitors’ requests. These spaces could only be experienced through the video footage subsequently delivered to visitors. Combining playful constructions with dark humour, My eyes are not in the centre questioned how technology reshapes our understanding of the body, space and reality, highlighting the growing distance between direct experience and its representation through screens and cameras.

From September to November 2018, Izumi was also an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London.