Tsubasa Kato
Tsubasa Kato’s practice involves collaboration with individuals and groups in the form of performances, structures, and moving image. His major series Pull and Raise/Topple makes visible social tensions and the dynamics of cooperation through people coming together to move a giant structure.
He has organized projects in places with complex histories and political contexts, including Fukushima after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Standing Rock Reservation in the United States, and a community of stateless people in Malaysia. Kato also explores geopolitical borders, migration, and belonging through such projects as a performance on an uninhabited island between Japan and Korea.
Using music and language, he has engaged with the nation, memory, and surveillance, re-examining the relationship between the individual and society in projects like Songs While Bound, a series he began in Seattle in 2017 in which musicians tied to one another perform the national anthem, and Superstring Secrets, held in Hong Kong during the pandemic in which large amounts of secret documents were shredded and then woven into a giant rope.
Kato has exhibited installations that prompt us to reconstruct collaboration and identity at various places around the world, including a solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery as well as Watermill Center (New York), Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (Berlin), Aichi Triennale 2019, and the Jeu de Paume (Paris).