The exhibition Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura presents the Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada in collaboration with two Denmark-based artists: composer and sound artist Aase Nielsen, and performance artist Body_hacker. Together, they explore the legacy of the groundbreaking Japanese dancer and performer Kazuko Tsujimura (1941–2004).

Kazuko Tsujimura was part of Japan’s post-war avant-garde, active from the 1960s onward. She participated in a number of collaborations, groups, and collectives across art forms and introduced the concept of ‘dance without body, without dance’. Despite her extensive oeuvre, Tsujimura’s groundbreaking work was largely overlooked by history. A rich archive of photographic material from performances, shows, and fragmented installations remained untouched in stacked boxes at her brother’s home until 2017, when artist and researcher Yoshiko Shimada ensured the transfer of the materials to the archive of Keio University Art Center in Tokyo.

In Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura, this archival material is presented to the public for the first time. The title of the exhibition weaves together Tsujimura’s lifelong artistic and spiritual explorations of body, dance, and movement with Yoshiko Shimada’s innovative performance and archival practice – across time and space. For decades, Shimada has worked to highlight overlooked practices of female artists and has reactivated artistic kinships in her own works through performance and reinterpretation of concepts, identities, and bodies.

The exhibition at HEIRLOOM showcases selected parts of Tsujimura’s extensive photographic archive alongside Shimada’s reinterpretations, in combination with new performance- and sound-based works by Body_hacker and Aase Nielsen. Here, archive and body meet, as the artists collectively evoke the sensibility embedded within the archive – through explorations of ideas around transgression and transfeminine expression in Tsujimura’s conceptual artistic practice. Her oeuvre is recontextualised through performances, reenactments, and interventions in the exhibition space, and the exhibition explores themes such as rituals, spiritual practice, kinship, and collective memory.

Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura is curated by bluestockings (bs) in collaboration with Yoshiko Shimada and the Keio University Art Center archive.

Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura is part of HEIRLOOM’s new program track ‘Unfiled’, where we make our space available to collaborators so that we can jointly explore a particular archive. With ‘Unfiled’, the aim is to give attention to the many unprocessed and unconventional stories.

Kazuko Tsujimura 辻村和子 (1941–2004) was a Japanese dancer and performer who, from the 1960s onwards, developed her distinctive performances that challenged concepts of body, gender, spirituality, and movement through interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations with leading conceptual artists of the time. Tsujimura created a new conceptual language for experimental dance and performance.

Yoshiko Shimada 嶋田美子 (1959–) is a Japanese feminist artist, activist, curator, and researcher. Since the late 1980s, she has explored issues related to gender, sexuality, and power with a particular focus on Japanese colonialism and imperialism. Through her feminist practice, Shimada challenges binary constructions, including those between victim and oppressor. She uses print, video, performance, research, and archiving in her work.

Aase Nielsen (1991–) is a composer, producer, and sound artist known for her experimental approach to composition, score practice, and performative sound art. Over several years, she has worked with hybrid concert forms and interdisciplinary collaborations. In exploring the relationship between body and sound, she often works at the intersection of avant-garde, experimental music, open score formats, sound installation, and improvisation.

Body_hacker – aka Sall Lam Toro – (1990–) is an antidisciplinary multimedia performance artist. Their work confronts what they call 'the hijacked body'. Through rituals, glitches, errors, dialogues with eco-erotic companions, text, resonance, and emotion, Body_hacker develops poetic multiplicities of the body and radical imagination within anti-capitalist, anarchist, and collective liberation forms.

Nana Francisca Schottländer (1977–) works across aesthetic disciplines within the fields of choreography, performance, video, and installation. Central to her practice is the use of the body as a living tool for exploration and creation. Using strategies such as immersion, co-creation, and extended duration, she has researched and worked extensively with spiritual concepts such as the Japanese Ma, representing the space, gap, or pause between objects, sounds, or moments.

Jane Jin Kaisen (1980–) is an artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and polyphonic feminist works involving themes such as memory, migration, and borders at the intersection of lived experience and larger political histories.

bluestockings (bs) is a collaborative platform and partnership between art historian and curator Karen Vestergaard Andersen and curator Helen Nishijo Andersen. (bs) forms a knowledge- and practice-based community within contemporary art centered around critical ecofeminism, practices of solidarity, spirituality, and civil rights activism from a transcultural perspective.

The exhibition is supported by:

The Danish Arts Foundation

Council of Visual Arts, Copenhagen Municipality

Koda Kultur

The Knud Højgaard Foundation

Keio University Art Center’s Archive, Tokyo

Sponsorship:

WakuWaku

Event program

Friday 6 June  5-8pm

Opening

5 pm Re-enactment of Kazuko Tsujimura’s ‘performance in the dark’, 1969, by Nana Francisca Schottländer

6.30 pm How to play, concert and performance by Aase Nielsen and ensemble: Binna Isabella, Isa Nam Sook, Ribka M. Pattinama Coleman, Jonas Torstensen. 

Tuesday 17 June, 5-7pm

Talk and screening by Yoshiko Shimada and Jane Jin Kaisen

Thursday 19 June, 5-8.30pm

Performance by Sall Lam Toro (part 1)

5-6pm A procession to Nirvana: A funeral for your thoughts

PAUSE (30 MIN.) 

6.30-8.30pm Centripetal incorporealities

Saturday 28 June, 3 pm

Performance and concert by Sall Lam Toro in collaboration with Aase Nielsen (part 2)

3-4pm Catastrophe is... unseeable Nirvana

Sunday 13 July

Finissage

No sign-up required.