I hear your breath in 4/4

About

Yanai creates installations of videos, photography and sound, often her performance as the subject of the installations, recorded with various media. For the upcoming exhibition, The basement gallery serves as a venue for the audience to vicariously experience the hypnotic performance that rolled out at the Tokyo Biennale in the summer of 2021 by way of video and audio, while new prints, audio and video works at the ground floor gallery may help us peek into the artist's vast scope of interests from where the young artist sources the concepts.

Yanai presents us unique perspective of the world through her practice, which increasingly incorporates the sound aspect of life, whether it is music, environmental audio or general noise, while examining and reconstructing the lived experience or performance with conscious attention to the physicality of body. Her practice reminds us of how a place, either present or past, is inseparably linked to sound and her sound always has the bodily, or physical resonance.

In the main video work 'Well Temperament' created with a sound artist Ken Ikeda, the artist's own breath during her run at and around the centre of London sets the audio base throughout the duration of the video, at 4/4, a musical time signature for four beats per measure. The everlasting, steady beat of footsteps blends in with environmental noise and other elements that are also recorded while running, almost to an intoxicating effect.

The performance took place at the open arcade gallery of Yushima Confucius Mausoleum in Tokyo. With the backdrop of the minimalistic, esoteric decor darkened with drapes that lets in sunlight ever so slightly as they gently floats along with the summer breeze, Yanai's performance is a spontaneous, living attempt, to reconcile the half-dream and the reality, searching to harmonise the beat that is generated by her own run, and her breathing while walking along the gallery of the by-gone era monument.

At the ground floor gallery, new prints and other works will shed light on the artist's take on new ways to conceive the world, created during the the periods when pandemic-related various restrictions on life were imposed.

A performance evening will take place on Thursday 3rd March, in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery First Thursdays. Detail to be announced later.