Koki Tanaka 
A Pottery Produced by 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt), 2013/2025 
A Piano Played by 5 Pianists at Once (First Attempt), 2012/2025 
A Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once (Second Attempt), 2010/2025 

What can we do together? This question lies at the heart of Koki Tanaka’s explorations into what happens when routine tasks, typically carried out by an individual, become actions shared with others. Three films by Tanaka are presented on Bergen School of Architecture’s mezzanine and are integrated within the daily rhythms unfolding all around, showing nine hairdressers giving one haircut, five pianists playing one piano, and five ceramists shaping a single piece of pottery together.  

Each film documents the negotiation required when people work together without a fixed plan. Tanaka records how participants temporarily set aside the ideas, approaches, and practices they have cultivated, and instead respond in earnest to each other’s movements and decisions. Such situations, as described by Tanaka are ‘purely collaborative moments’, in which the acts of coordination and compromise involved in collaborative work are made visible.  

The films invite the viewer to reflect on new ways in which collective action and togetherness fundamentally underpin everyday life, forming what Tanaka understands as an ‘accumulation of collaboration’. For the artist, working together is an ethical proposition: participants must undergo a process of self-transformation — even self-dissolution — in which they relinquish individual control and listen deeply and carefully to one another. In doing so, they reveal the tensions, failures, and beauty inherent in any collaborative process. 

Koki Tanaka (b. Mashiko, Tochigi, 1975) lives and works in Kyoto. Through video, photography, installation, and collaborative events, he explores how people act together in shared tasks. Tanaka’s early practice focused on everyday objects as a possible avenue of escape from routine. Increasingly, however, he has developed projects that stage collective situations as a way to reveal how participants negotiate and interrelate within unfamiliar cooperative situations. The artist refers to these as ‘collective acts’: experiments without fixed outcomes that examine the social dynamics and interdependence of group activity. Tanaka has exhibited widely, with notable presentations at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022); the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2018); the 55th and 57th Venice Biennales (2013 and 2017); the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2018–2019); and many other venues. 

What’s on?

No scheduled events

View full programme
© Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou and Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo. Koki Tanaka, A Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once (Second Attempt), 2010.