NaoKo TakaHashi: Stubbornly Persistent Illusion Chapter 1: Red Planet

NaoKo TakaHashi
Stubbornly Persistent Illusion Chapter 1: Red Planet
IMT Gallery

Each time that I'm going to the East of East London, it feels like to participate in a safari. Where the fauna is quite diverse and ambivalent, living in communion with and in Nature. While, instead, us, humans, we destroy our environment, practice criminal acts against ourselves and against nature; we create a mess wherever we are! Nonetheless, we're also able of the most extraordinary things, one of them, is to be at the top of the food chain. Whereas, those live a bare life, we, in their place, live a life surrounded by gadgets and trinkets.

Cary a camera with me; have a notebook on the side; someone who knows the area and I'm ready for adventure. The exploration of Nature in its wilderness, the contact with the indigenous to perceive sociocultural identity, document their habitat, habits, costumes, ways of living and doing. Travel for hours through inhospitable paths and sceneries to capture on camera the shacks where they live, the rags they use, tools to kill, cook and eat, the sounds made to communicate between each other, within the tribe and beyond. And, afterwards, return home; to civilisation; to safety, away from that uninhabitable and hostile place.

Do not take me wrong, please! I do know quite interesting people who live, have been living and will live there, (maybe) forever. I do appreciate their company, their ideas and overwhelming knowledge and humour. Sincerely! That is one of the reasons why I go on those expeditions. I even dated a woman that lived there – you know, there are some moments in our life when we pretend that we are radical, open minded, engage the exotic, fortunately, that fever, passed after a few months.

However, the reason why these, now, has to do with NaoKo TakaHashi's exhibition at IMT Gallery, in Cambridge Heat Rd. 'Stubbornly Persistent Illusion Chapter 1: Red Planet'!

Nowadays, the fauna that we can find East of East London reflect a gentrification of local population and hipster-led wannabes, pseudo-something. In ten years time, the environment it would reflect might be like Shoreditch or Hoxton – which, presently, marks the point where the city succumbs to the hipster-led gentrification that flattens the local largely population out on that way. Now, it bares resemblance to what those places looked like ten years ago; presently, it is just a place that is.

These people reluctantly want to come out of the closet concerning their real opinion, in relation to the reason why the interpretations regarding a particular possibility are altered to the conditions that define that same reluctance. Particularly, the fauna that lives and wants to live in this new environment, due to a trendy idea, reveals the ambiguities and inconsistencies of cultural representations, which I’m referring too, and the interplay of communication.

So, idiosyncratically, we can find in this environment those types of people that suffer from particular conditions, such as high levels of discursive inconsistencies and contradictory ideas, and conventional life disturbances and mental structural incongruence. For instance, are against major cooperation’s and labels, but buy Alexander McQueen's clothes; despise social institutionalisation and classification, but attend private Colleges and, the first thing they show you, is the family royal's heritage; those who proclaim that we should all live in an egalitarian community, but, only, if they are the those who will lead and decide. Really, it is like thinking that Hitler was high, on MDMA, when he decided to do whatever he decided to do; or, it is like on a Zoo, a contradictory assemblage of animals, an entertaining lie. Which, “in the end, isn’t that the real truth? …”. Where the environment has the capacity to create something that is self-transcendent, beyond the stubbornly persistent illusion.

«NaoKo TakaHashi (born 1973, Nigata, Japan) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. She has exhibited and performed widely in the UK, Europe and the Middle East including Tate Modern, London; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Riso Museo d’arte Contemporanea Della Sicilia, Palermo; Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen; Bozar, Brussels; Darat Al Funun, The Khalid Showman Foundation, Amman, Jordan; Al Ma’mal Foundation for contemporary Art, Jerusalem; the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, and in the first major trilingual biennale in North Africa, the 3rd AiM International Biennale, Marrakesh. NaoKo TakaHashi is represented by IMT Gallery.» [PR]