According to Yayoi Kusama, “My performances are a kind of symbolic philosophy with polka dots. A polka dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless, and unknowing. Polka dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of the people, two or three or more polka dots bacome movement. Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in Love.” She went on to say, “Let us unite with eternity. Obliterate ourselves. Dissolve into our environments. Forget ourselves. Self-obliteration is just another means of escape.”
This performance can be interpreted as a sharp hint that in our contemporary world, financial capital is accelerating along a vector toward war business. As if resonating with Kusama’s message, French philosopher Félix Guattari praises the artistic value of her work. “The intensities engendered by Kusama’s compositions, while remaining anchored in a very traditional Japanese imaginary, above all constitute extraordinary dispositifs of subjectivation and aesthetics of the most modern of materials, those which, let’s not forget, our societies of consumption otherwise reserve for their miserable and disenchanted universes.” Félix Guattari saw Yayoi Kusama as great contemporary artist forging the sensibility of a most unpredictable future, an artist producing a new subjectivity liberated from the hegemony of capitalist value production oriented only toward profit.

Why Not: A Serenade of Eschatological Ecology, presented as part of the exhibition, is Shusaku Arakawa’s first foray into filmmaking, an experimental film featuring the performance of a young woman. The set, a room with a table, bed, and bicycle, is actually Arakawa’s studio. The camera voyeuristically follows a woman around the room, capturing each of her actions. The woman mingles with the door and the table in the room, posing questions about the human existence through her physical performance in this enclosed space. Surrounded by an inorganic wilderness with no other person present, the actions seem to be those of solitary struggle (masturbation). The performance represents physicality underlain by bottomless chaos, and depicts the natural forces that implode the human body, transformed into symbols worn on the body. The origins of the thinking that led to Arakawa’s “architectural body” approach that emerged in the 1990s seem to be condensed into this performance. The questions posed by Shusaku Arakawa as a young artist shook viewers’ perceptions, orienting them toward the possibility of developing a new means of understanding. They skillfully navigate the procedures for recognition involving abstruse language, and attempt to take overall control of the phenomenon of meaning. This provocative experiment by Arakawa is highly appropriate for an age of confusion in a world that is increasingly divided and polarized, and in which the systems that we had become used are no longer functioning. “We hope future generations find our humor useful for the models of thought and other escape routes they shall construct.”*

1000 Names was one of Anish Kapoor’s earliest series, executed in 1979 and 1980. His inspiration for the use of pigment in different colors came from a journey through India in 1979 where small piles of pigments for cosmetic and ritual use were sold at the entrances of temples and roadside sanctuaries. Kapoor’s 1000 names was a surprise. To the artist, its sudden appearance was prompted by the pigment. Separate mounds of powdered pigment (vivid red, yellow, bright blue, white) completely cover certain objects, producing forms with softer outlines and hiding the true shapes of the objects underneath. These elements give rise to associations with architecture, then with organic forms. Sometimes, they seem to exist between the two: suggesting forms in transition, somewhere between nature and the abstract. The pigments provide a marvelous embodiment of a contradiction that Kapoor needed to express.
Describing this series, Kapoor says, "With the early powder pieces, one of the things I was trying to do was to arrive at something which was as if unmade, as if self-manifested, as if there by its own volition. ... I was much more concerned with the way the objects gave out light; they seem to be a source of light. ... [1000 Names] implies that the objects are part of a much bigger whole. The objects seem to be coming out of the ground or the wall, the powder defining a surface, implying that there is something below the surface, like an iceberg poking out of the subconscious."*
The white powder covering the objects is a metaphor for the vast expanse of nature. In view of the modern condition, it inevitably reminds one of the “ashes of death,”—the fallout from detonation of an atomic bomb.

The Nambu horse is a breed of horse unique to Japan that is now extinct. This animation work, Galloping Nambu breed horse, depicts it resurrected as an ice sculpture, running across a snowfield.
The Nambu stallion is extolled in the Gosen Wakashu, a tenth-century (Heian Period) anthology of waka poetry, but pure Nambu horses disappeared as a result of reforms in the Meiji Period (1868–1912) that required native Japanese horses to be crossed with foreign breeds as part of efforts to boost Japan’s wealth and military strength. There are few extant records of these horses, but based on the skeleton of the last Nambu horse—preserved at the Morioka Agricultural High School—the artist created twelve sculptures, outputting them in 3D and freezing them in conditions that would form icicles to bulk up their surfaces, thereby resurrecting the Nambu breed as translucent white horses with thin coats of ice.
The sight of a pure white horse running free and happy in the snow of Aomori—which has deep snowfalls in winter—is beautiful, a fairy tale ending. Nevertheless, Nambu horses were selectively bred to enhance their role, which involved functioning as a means for transporting goods for farmers, as weapons for soldiers to fight with, or as eye-candy and a symbol of financial power for nobility. Eventually, the cross-breeding to produce stronger battle horses under the Meiji restoration reforms resulted in the Nambu horses disappearing into the gene pool of mixed breeds. Thinking of its history of being manipulated and pushed around by humanity, the resurrection of this horse in ghostly form can be interpreted as a critical comment on human activity in the Anthropocene.
Galloping Nambu breed horse is also an homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking photographs of horses in motion which consisted of series of shots in quick succession and became a vital step in the development of motion pictures. Shooting this animation in monochrome gives it a nostalgic air, harking back to the time of gelatin-silver photographs and black-and-white movies. The sense of loss for the Nambu horse, which disappeared with the advent of newer technology, is accentuated by shooting in analog technology from the early days of photography, rather than using today’s digital technology.

After the 3.11 earthquake, Akira Kamo came to see the disasters that hit Japan in the postwar period as being at the root of his practice, and set about exploring the potential for expression on that theme. In addition to the aftermath of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Minamata disease in Kumamoto, he made a serious reexamination of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant issue ten years after it emerged. Through a number of long visits to the locality, he has constructed his own unique methodology.
Anti-sanctuary is a massive painting, over 7 meters wide. It depicts a scene where people covered in flames are marching through snow-covered mountains, creating a vivid contrast between the subzero world of ice and the many-thousand-degree temperature of the flames enveloping each of the people.
The figures are all burning, but are acting differently, with actions including continuing to march onwards, standing in contemplation, holding out their hands, and falling at the side of the track, burned up. It this had been a depiction of people burning themselves to death, it could have been interpreted as taking up the universal theme of people giving their own lives to protest against oppression around the world—including examples of self-immolation in Tibet, Chechnya, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Russia, China, and Korea. However, suicide by setting oneself on fire is generally done in the view of lots of people—on major roads, public squares, or social media—and the people in this work show no sign of having sought out such a stage. They are not protesting against dictatorial regimes that have taken away the freedom of speech. Instead, they are burning quietly in a frozen world with no-one else around.
Sanctuaries are generally pure, uncontaminated places where super-human entities manifest themselves. Kamo’s Anti-sanctuary also represents a place that we people cannot enter, but the prohibition is due to the place being so defiled that people cannot go in. When first exhibited, it was installed opposite a painting of workers heading for a nuclear plant, so it can be interpreted as a metaphor for nameless individuals who are aware of the potential for lethal exposure to radiation, but are going to work to contribute to bringing the accident to an end. Alternatively, the depiction of people burning up in a world of extreme cold conjures up ideas of the feelings of people who are forced out of their homes by war or nuclear accidents, only to discover the cold reality of an outside world with no salvation, or the feelings of people who have no option but to continue living their lives even though they are burning up inside, with the flames reaching all the way to their bones.
Stepping back and taking an overview, I remember that the ethics of postwar contemporary art have treated massacres and major disasters as taboo subjects that cannot be appropriated as the theme for artistic expression. However, instead of just shutting up and averting our eyes, this work seems to provide a solution for the question of how to think about and pass down issues that cannot be spoken about.

Maki Ohkojima expresses life as the locus of constant intermingling between multiple instances of life and death, urging us to reconsider our human-centric approach to the world. Golem and Venus is an installation of two torsos (dolls with parts of their bodies missing), inspired by legend and constructed from a number of media, including cloth and steel, leather, ceramics, an animal skull, feathers, petrified wood, video, photographs, and pigments. Through it, she attempts to reinterpret the human body as a home for many different lifeforms—plants and animals, bacteria, and viruses.
Golem appears in Jewish religious mythology as a figure of mud or clay without a conscious mind. Here, Golem has grass growing from its mouth, flowers coming from its eyes, and other vegetation in full bloom at its heart, leg, and other places. Instead of hands it has feathers. Depicted as a human-like figure created from earth and returning to earth or dissolving in water, it takes the form of an interspecies hybrid reminding us that humanity is also an entity like Golem, born from earth.
In contrast, Venus is a torso comprising scraps of leather patched together, on which is projected a circular video collage of images depicting images such as the galaxy and plankton. Ranging from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from whole planets to microorganisms indiscernible to the naked eye, the collage is condensed onto the body of the goddess of love and fertility, whose name represents sexual love in Latin and adorns the morning star. This juxtaposition expresses the vast extent of the universe that dwells within a single human body.
Both these figures, Venus and Golem, depict humans as an accumulation or mix of non-human phenomena, implying that the human existence, rather than being autonomous, is a small and transient perturbance in a corner of the universe, just like clouds, water, stone, flowers, insects, animals, and much more.

Algægraphies are "living images" formed by photosensitive microorganisms (micro-algae). Between biological and particulate movements, the cells dynamically organise themselves to respond to the luminous variations of their environment.
For the creation of Entropies, this biological matrix is subjected to a process of pictorial disturbance: the dissipation of the landscape is carried out here with the help of a scanner whose mode of acquisition induces a behavioural modification of the cells, which then reorganise themselves according to their own rules of composition. The negative used evokes an imaginary artificial ecosystem implanted on the Batignolles district in Paris, then under construction.
The film Photosynthèse is a "photographic inventory of the invisible" listing the thousands of objects recovered from the port of Marseille between 2016 and 2020, which have been characterised by the association MerTerre. The voice of its founder, Isabelle Poitou, mingles with that of sociologist Baptiste Monsaingeon to guide us in an intimate and analytical exploration of waste, set to sound by composer Térence Meunier.
Between oblivion and reminiscence, the processual revelation of these objects uses a process known as "algægraphique" developed by the artist in collaboration with the "Cyanobactéries, Cyanotoxines et Environnement" team at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France. Micro-algae, usually used as markers of pollution, replace the photographic silver grain to reveal an image that has become alive.