Shu Isaka “Field∵Workom”

10/4 (Sat)-11/1 (Sat), 2025
Opening hours: 12:00-19:00 (Wed-Sat)
Closed on Sun, Mon, Tue and National Holidays
Reception: Saturday, October 4, 17:00-19:00


In the exhibition space, multiple sculptural objects referred to as “Zōkaku” are scattered. These attempt to give physical form to “instrumental case” (zōkaku)—a grammatical category that once existed in the Proto-Indo-European languages and can still be found in modern Slavic languages. This case, at once self-evident in perception and yet enigmatic, grants nouns multiple functions such as tool, means, accompaniment, location, temporal span, transformation, metaphor, and subject–object inversion. The objects in the exhibition space are, so to speak, the Zōkaku of a camera tripod, the Zōkaku of stone, the Zōkaku of a book, the Zōkaku of an online map, the Zōkaku of a prop, the Zōkaku of pyroclastic deposits... Through all the befores and afters of various fields, these groups of objects are materialized as instruments for enclosing and sustaining uncertain fields.

Zōkaku ad hoc endows space with functions, guiding wandering agents of (non-)decision. One such instance is the real-time cinema “CeCeCe∵TOKAMAKOM”, which will be screened in this exhibition and in which the situation unfolds in constant response to data read by certain Zōkaku. To describe the story of this moving image: the quasi-subject “Cerebral Celestial Cephalon” surveys a geothermal valley, caught in the tense balance between drawing upon energy seeping from the Earth’s interior or receiving energy pouring down from outer space, while grappling with how to deal with “undesirable facilities” present in the region and demands from stakeholders, lingering in a protracted sequence—a temporal span—leading toward a decision.

That tools exert effects upon both subject and space—this may be seen as a continuous thread in human history, from stone tools to nuclear fusion reactors, one that appears to be at once a tale of success and a tale of grand failure. This exhibition, however, seeks to present a perspective in which the situations created by being-with tools that precede the field, together with virtual information spaces, go beyond mere simulation to generate their own temporal spans, where influences arriving from “elsewhere” to come are entangled with the time of the present. If fortunate, through this singular perspective we may inversely illuminate—by way of counter-exposure—a sense of reality of a technological field in which open tools are at work, rather than a society where unilateral, closed technological investments bound to the economy of expectation prevail


Shu Isaka
Born in 1990 in Nara, Japan.
Based in Hyogo, Japan.

Selected Exhibitions:
Solo exhibitions: “Polyfold Quirk” (2023, Kodama Gallery | Tennoz, Tokyo); “Méconnaissance ‘Tephra’ ‘Tephra’” (2023, Token Art Center, Tokyo). Group exhibitions: “ICC Annual 2023: Forms of Things” (2023, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Tokyo); “Open Space 2021: New Flatland” (2021, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], Tokyo); “DXP (Digital Transformation Planet) — Toward the Next Interface” (2023, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa). Participated as the artist collective MANTLE (Shu Isaka + Soshi Nakamura).