Taninaka Yuske: Choose Grief

Hailing from Kansai and based in Berlin, Taninaka Yuske’s interdisciplinary sculpture, dance, and performance practice treats the human body not as something independent but as an entity influenced by its surroundings, exploring the emergent body’s relationships with the environment and other people.

For his first solo exhibition at an art museum, Taninaka presents new installations, sculptures, video installations, and performances, reflecting on the inherent fragility of the body in terms of aging, illness, injury, and disability as well as our desires and fleeting hopes encompassed within the always-evolving medical technology that aspires to conquer that fragility, and, conversely, a mode of living that embraces it, that acknowledges that things do not always go as we want.

The exhibition title connotes an inquiry into our ability to live in a way that engages with the loss of our bodily functions over time due to the unavoidable: injury, illness, aging, and death. When complete treatment or recovery is elusive, we must compromise with the constantly changing reality of our lives. Whether in good or bad health, we are all prisoners of our uncertain and unstable bodies, a condition that this exhibition re-examines.