Burning Question
How are shifts in the global textile trade and new technologies tied to the current political and economic state? What can the obsolescence of artisanal techniques tell us about the increasingly dematerialized world we live in today?
Traveling To
Japan
About the Project
During her travels Tajima will continue her exploration into the history of jacquard woven fabrics and the preservation of other artisinal techniques. She will also research advances in technology and high-end manufacturing in Japan, and how they relate to shifts in the information industry.
About the Artist
Born 1975, Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in New York.
Mika Tajima employs sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance, often drawing on contradictions in modernist design and architecture to consider today’s regime of collaborative production. Connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, her work explores how the performing subject (e. g., speaker, dancer, designer, factory worker, musician, filmmaker) is constructed in spaces in which material objects outline action and engagement. Tajima also works collaboratively under the moniker New Humans, including on projects with Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, Judith Butler, and C. Spencer Yeh, among others.
Tajima’s work has been shown internationally, at venues including the South London Gallery, London; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Sculpture Center and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York City; Bass Museum, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Tajima lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA from Columbia University.
Photograph by Aubrey Mayer.