Koki Tanaka

Toilet paper floating in the ventilator draft, pigeons pecking caviar on the street, Coca-Cola flowing endlessly from a can, shoes falling down staircases one pair after another, etc.: the videos of Koki Tanaka explore ordinariness and construct situations that are burlesque and subversive at once. Playing with the laws of physics and the notion of infinite time, the artist tries to enhance the potential of objects encountered in our everyday lives. Koki Tanaka has designed a special project for the Palais de Tokyo, conceiving the entrance into the gallery as a hole through which someone has thrown a bowling ball. Where the bowling pins should be, he has arranged items he collected from within the Palais de Tokyo (storerooms, offices, etc.): chairs, a waste-paper basket, a set of shelves, among others. These elements are integrated into the gallery space and knocked over, as if struck by the bowling ball. In the midst of the scattered pieces of furniture—remnants of his performance— is a video that retraces the initial event, thereby imbibing the work with the story of its own past. Koki Tanaka has taken part in many exhibitions such as the Taipei Biennial (2006), the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2006), and The Door into Summer: the Age of Micropop at the Mito Art Tower (2007) in Japan. In 2005-2006 he was one of the residents at Le Pavillon, the study program attached to the Palais de Tokyo.

Koki Tanaka
Setting Up and Taking Down