Exhibition: 'Spirit of Automatism' by Meiro Koizumi

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is pleased to present Meiro Koizumi’s first solo exhibition in the UK since he became a co-winner of the Artes Mundi Prize in 2021. About One of Japan’s most prominent contemporary artists, Koizumi is internationally acclaimed for video installations that explore socio-political issues through re-enactment. Touching on themes of collective memory, war and psychological impact, he is concerned “to capture the forms of the violent rituals that support rational modern civilisation at a deep level”. This exhibition, entitled Spirit of Automatism , combines video, sculpture and drawing to convey Koizumi’s idea of the automated human – a person who acts unconsciously, as if deprived of their own free will. This is epitomised by a new sculpture from his ongoing series Altars . Here human body parts dissolve into car engine blocks, in a kind of Al-generated assemblage, to signify the shifting state of our physicality in a technologically mediated world. Koizumi explains: It can be said that the collective human desire for transcendence, spurred on by technologies based on modern science, is getting stronger and stronger. There is a need to bring to the surface once again the monstrous contours of that desire, and to represent again its ritual magic. For us humans, with our desire for transcendence, war is a ritual cursing, and modern weapons are new forms of Buddhist statues. Propaganda is an occult form of prayer, and generative AI, which behaves just like humans, has become the animistic and sinister god of our age. In The Angels of Testimony (2019) Koizumi makes the analogy between this condition, affecting almost all of us in contemporary society, and the mental state of veterans during war and conflict. A three-channel video installation, it centres on 99-year-old war Hajime Kondo, deployed to China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Reflecting on his actions as a perpetrator, Kondo continued to suffer from trauma and guilt despite his fading memory. Working with 11 Japanese young people, aged between 17 and 26, Koizumi demonstrates how Kondo’s experience can find a new form of representation, here in their deadpan yet extraordinarily affecting recitation of his words on the streets of Tokyo. Koizumi is concerned especially with how the trauma of war pervades our everyday lives and how memory and emotion is represented and transmitted across generations. At a time of rising geopolitical tension and conflict, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence, his work resonates with renewed urgency, pushing us to imagine the future we are creating. Read more Toggle Sculpture Film / Video