The exhibition Disappearing Body - Becoming Tsujimura presents the contemporary Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada in collaboration with Danish-based artists: composer and sound artist Aase Nielsen and performance artist Sall Lam Toro. Together they examine the legacy of the pioneering Japanese dancer and performer Kazuko Tsujimura (1941-2004).

As part of the Japanese post-war avant-garde, artist Kazuko Tsujimura was active from the 1960s onwards. Here she was involved in numerous collaborations, groups and collectives across art forms, and introduced the concept of "dance without body, without dancing". Despite Tsujimura's extensive oeuvre, posterity overlooked her seminal work. A rich archive of photographic material from performances, acts and fragmented installations remained in unopened stacked boxes at her brother's home until 2023, when Yoshiko Shimada secured the material's entry into the Keio University Art Center’s archive, Tokyo.

In Disappearing Body - Becoming Tsujimura, the archive material is publicly presented for the first time. Across time and space the exhibition title intertwines Tsujimura's lifelong artistic and spiritual explorations of body, dance and movement with Shimada's innovative performance and archival practice. For decades, Shimada has centered overlooked female artistic practices in her works and reactivated artistic kinships by performing and paraphrasing concepts, identities and bodies anew.

The exhibition at HEIRLOOM presents the extensive archival material together with works by Shimada, Sall Lam Toro and Aase Nielsen. Here it recontextualizes Tsujimura’s oeuvre through performances, re-enactments and interventions within the exhibition space, and explores topics such as rituals, spiritual practice, kinship and collective memory.

Disappearing Body - Becoming Tsujimura is curated by bluestockings (bs) in collaboration with Keio University Art Center’s archive.