Spreading across the glass passageway from the gallery space to the courtyard outside, Anais-karenin’s They have never been plants is an installation of photographs, sound, plants, and scents that appeal to our physical senses. Based on her interests in how colonial history intersects with human management of flora, Anais-kareninhas conducted research on present-day forest vegetation management methods and the relationship premodern people had with plants. (...) They have never been plants is a multifaceted engagement with aspects of plants, which are frequently overlooked as static entities, and a reconsideration of the diverse relationships we have had with flora, but which have disappeared over the course of human settlement and development. Instead of viewing plants simply as useful materials or products for humans, the artist is urging us to regard them as kin who share world with us.
- Curatorial text by Aruma Toyama
"Out of the immeasurable materialized comprises two layered images: the distribution of cedars, which wereplanted on a large scape throughout Japan after the war in order to secure lumber for construction, and a photograph of an old-growth forest. Resembling two posts, Unnamed transience (of shifted roots) is a sculpture assembled from pigment extracted from plants and decolored, transparent leaves sourced from cedars and nearby weeds. Like imaginably unknown prayer suffuses the gallery space with scent extracted from false arborvitae, whose numbers are decreasing due to selective planting, and which sensorily connects the viewer with plants and evokes the lost diversity of our forests."
- text by Aruma Toyama
Exhibited in the passageway, Excerpted is based on the artist’s historical research and records left by Japanese people documenting the lives of Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in the nineteenth century. Anais-karenin here critically explores how such ethnographic materials were part of the process by which the Japanese exploited useful resources from Ainu communities. The courtyard features To ascend to ground, in which the artist has planted examples of the Tohoku flora with which the Ainu lived, learning from the close relationship they evolved with nature, and creating a work from the sonification of Ainu plant names.
- text by Aruma Toyama
