Mika Tajima: Super Natural

Through her work, Mika Tajima makes us aware of the invisible structures of communal existence through our ever-evolving relationship with technology and the built environment. The title of this exhibition, Super Natural, draws on the notion of an order of existence that exceeds the laws of nature and stretches beyond the observable universe. Inside the cultural economies of heightened technological efficiency and optimization, the boundaries between our authentic and digital identities have become blurred to the point of unrecognizability. Our individual and communal agencies, which so often are vulnerable and contingent, are subjects of deep inquiry as transitory agents at the threshold between familiarity and otherness.

Super Natural presents a selection of Tajima’s latest bodies of work, from her Negative Entropy textiles to her Pranayama monoliths, Anima and Mirror blown glass sculptures, Ulterior air-jet wallpaper, and Art d’Ameublement thermoformed paintings. Together these works integrate ancient practices with electromagnetic energy to penetrate the psyche as well as control, regulate, and augment one’s mental state through the body. According to the artist, “Under the regime of techno-capitalism, we are the subject of contactless forces from within and beyond. In my practice, I’m transmediating between the invisible and the material to represent and understand the agency of being uncontainable, unreachable, and not yet knowable.”

Tajima visualizes the various states in which we hover among the many relational spaces outside ourselves. The exhibition interrogates the location of agency in our somatic experience of the world, which is increasingly abounding in artificial intelligence, by reminding us that life still has physicality through the invisible and the unknowable.

—Mika Yoshitake

On Friday, July 12, musician Daren Ho activated Mika Tajima: Super Natural with custom synths and minimal beats. Throughout his one-hour set, he wove a new kind of sound bath that allowed visitors to reach a higher meditative state together.

This event is part of West Side Fest 2024, a weekend of artmaking, workshops, dancing, crafts, and other special programming across participating organizations from the West Side Cultural Network (WSCN).

Mika Tajima is an artist whose practice materializes techniques developed to shape the physicality, productivity, and desires of the human body. Her sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations focus on the embodied experience of ortho-architectonic control and computational life. From architectural systems to ergonomic design to psychographic data, Tajima’s works operate in the space between the immaterial and the tangible to create heightened encounters that target the senses and emotions of the viewer, underlining the dynamics of control and agency.

Mika Yoshitake is a Los Angeles–based independent curator who earned her PhD in art history from UCLA, which culminated in the AICA-USA award-winning exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha (Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 2012). She has organized museum retrospectives of Yayoi Kusama (M+ Hong Kong), Yoshitomo Nara (LACMA), and Lee Ufan (Guggenheim) as well as organized group shows on contemporary Japanese art, including Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s (Blum & Poe, 2019). Formerly a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2011–18), she is currently guest curating Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (Hammer Museum, 2024) as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide.