EUKARYOTE is pleased to announce Tomohiro Kubota’s Solo Exhibition, “eat ro ekyu”, through April 15th to May 1st.

This exhibition “eat ro ekyu” is the first ever solo show by an emerging contemporary artist Tomohiro Kubota.

Kubota’s practice examines our ethical values and moral criteria, traversing multiple mediums and disciplines including installation and performance. In his recent works, Kubota has placed a focus on collective possession within a community and explored how we can deal with a variety forms of debts as an individual at the same time as the human beings.

Underlying Kubota’s practice is an attitude which he expresses with a metaphor of symptomatic treatment that seeks to improve his own environment through the creation of artworks. This approach illustrates the artist’s question towards the current situation of the capitalism which drives to keep producing new things. This also can be overlapped with the figure of artist who continues to create new works. Such a practice is at the same time an act of finding another aspect in existing things and creating alternative values from them.

For this exhibition, Kubota completely changes the layout of the venue. The original wall of EUKARYOTE which has a distinctive shape was removed, exposing a backspace that used to be hidden from the visitors. Artworks and equipments stored in the space accordingly have been moved to a warehouse during the exhibition period.

Kubota transforms the gallery into an suspended and experimental space in which an alternative methods of operation will be demonstrated through these operations. Further, he finds new meanings in the existing objects that were originally in the gallery through reconstructing the space with them. Behind these trials, we can see the artist’s doubts and limitations in creating new things, as well as his concern about the debts they may have for the future.

This attitude is also reflected in the title of this exhibition, “eat ro ekyu,” an anagram of the gallery’s name. The artist describes the aim of this exhibition as “a redecoration.” It is a reconfiguration of existing values, and at the same time a trial and error process intended to create a better space and environment. On the other hand, such approaches reminds us of the works by institutional-critique artists in the 1970s/1980s, who criticized the institutions/systems of the white cube, and turned their critical attention to the socioeconomic frameworks that defined the art world.

This exhibition “eat ro ekyu” aims to try a new system of the gallery space and, by extension, to create a new organic system, using EUKARYOTE as a case study. We hope you will come witness this experimental attempt by Kubota to explore a possibility of the entire space at his first ever solo exhibition at EUKARYOTE.