NAKASHIMA Rika

Profile

Born in Aichi in 1995. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Graduated with an M.A in Art Studies and Practices from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2023.
Nakashima critiques the modernist rational and capitalist mechanism of the public/private dichotomy in the urban space and creates works that reveal their non-dual relationship. Likening the opposition to life/death and visible/invisible as well, they compose installations in which the viewers wander between the outside and the inside.

Recent exhibitions:
2023 ‟Keep Out of □,” TALION Gallery, Tokyo
2022 ‟Awakening and Illusion: Dialogues with the Invisible, Astral Foothills: House Show,” Goethe Institut Tokyo
2021 ‟I tower over my dead body.,” Gallery TOH, Tokyo
2021 ‟Bodies On The Matter,” Tomotoshi Art Museum, Tokyo
2020 ‟A City Dreaming ,” Tokyo Metropolitan Arts Museum

About works / performance

In my artworks that typically make use of the political specificity of space, I attempt to intervene publicly in urban space through rituals inspired by traditional ceremonial acts. In particular, my primary focus in recent years have been on the works of multidisciplinary installation arts, especially sound installation, which engage viewers in a cathartic experience by overlapping multiple sounds together. Neither fully seen nor blocked out, the medium of sound installation allows them to explore the possibilities of signification hidden in the common urban signs arranged throughout the exhibition space, to discover gestures of anti-rationality and anti-modernity under post-capitalism.