My eyes are not in the centre
Project description
My eyes are not in the centre was Taro Izumi’s first UK solo exhibition, presented at White Rainbow in Fitzrovia, London. Comprising entirely new work, the exhibition explored the ways technology mediates perception and transforms first-hand experience into something increasingly encountered through screens and cameras.
Izumi’s title evokes a state of visual and sensory disorientation. Across the exhibition, minor actions are captured on camera, isolated, reversed and reconstituted, creating a complex relationship between recorded and lived experience. Familiar objects and everyday scenes become subtly strange, exposing the gap between what is perceived and what is mediated through technology.
Izumi’s installations combine video with structural and architectural interventions, creating feedback loops between physical space and moving image. A bartender repeatedly chisels a block of concrete with an ice pick, while elsewhere a group of figures attempt to sunbathe beneath the light of five projectors. The constructed beach scene, populated by artificial fruit and synthetic materials, becomes an absurd simulacrum of a tropical resort.
For the exhibition, Izumi also explored drone technology, replacing its automated and unmanned logic with a deliberately human presence. The gallery’s backroom, attic and office were transformed into inaccessible installations, visible only through video footage recorded by a ‘human drone’. Sitting on a theatrical wooden staircase, the performer was equipped with a GoPro camera attached to a prosthetic hand and entered the closed spaces at the request of visitors.
The resulting exchange introduced an intentionally cumbersome human intermediary into a system designed to eliminate direct human involvement. Visitors could experience the inaccessible installations only through the video subsequently handed to them by the human drone, creating a recursive relationship between performer, technology, viewer and space.
Through playful constructions and dark humour, My eyes are not in the centre examines the changing relationship between body, image and technology. Izumi’s installations occupy a space between the physical and the virtual, questioning how technology alters what we see, experience and understand as reality.
From September to November 2018, Izumi was also in residence at Delfina Foundation, London, concurrent with his exhibition at White Rainbow.
Bio
Taro Izumi (b. 1976, Nara, Japan) is a Tokyo-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses video, installation, sculpture, drawing and performance. His work combines familiar objects, architectural structures and digital technologies to create playful and often absurd environments that explore perception, embodiment and the relationship between physical and mediated experience.
Recent solo exhibitions include Dreamland at the Nara Prefecture Historical and Artistic Culture Complex (2024), Sit, Down. Sit Down Please, Sphinx. at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2023), Ahetsukuri at CAPSULE, Tokyo (2022) and Kodoku Experiment at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2022). His work has also been presented internationally at institutions including Museum Tinguely in Basel, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
Recent group exhibitions include FAIRE CORPS at Villa Datris Foundation in France and Endeavours and Masterpieces at Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille (2024), as well as Yamanashi International Art Triennale: Yatsugatake Art Ecology and Cat’s Narrow Road at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2023).
Project details
Year: 2018
Artist: Taro Izumi
Exhibition: My eyes are not in the centre
Venue: White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London
Dates: 14 September – 3 November 2018
Organised in cooperation with: Take Ninagawa, Tokyo
Residency: Delfina Foundation, London
Catalogue: Essays by Philomena Epps with installation photographs
Country: United Kingdom