Private View: Somewhat Infrequently by Daisuke Kosugi

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The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is pleased to present Daisuke Kosugi’s first UK solo exhibition Somewhat Infrequently. The show will feature Kosugi’s two most recent works, A False Weight (2019) and All that goes before forget (2021).

A False Weight (2019) explores how domestic and social architecture represent certain ideas and mould our movement and habits. In this work Toru Iwashita, a Butoh dancer, depicts Kosugi’s father Masanori Kosugi, who suffers from a chronic degenerative brain disease affecting his mobility and balance. The film shows repeating sequences of his daily routine at different stages of the disease’s progression, and being in step with his movements we become conscious of the notion of time as a normalised construct. Carefully avoiding objectifying the disease, throughout its 49 minutes the film presents a series of static images with subtle differences between them. By doing this Kosugi makes us question what we thought we knew about memory, and how it determines what remains and what is lost in the flow of time.

All that goes before forget (2021) attempts to portray post-traumatic stress disorder experiences. Titled from the opening sentence of Samuel Beckett’s short prose piece ‘Enough’, the work mirrors how Beckett worked with the text, defying his readers’ ability to narrate a story. The film seemingly consists of three protagonists, a young girl in post-war Norway, a Japanese schoolgirl during WWII, and an androgyne person in their twenties in a contemporary domestic setting, yet as the title suggests, the work refuses to pin down the subjects to a specific place, a particular time, or any obvious attributes. Kosugi purposely leaves mere traces of the subjects and thus highlights their existence and potential connections beyond time and space. Conflating fiction, personal experience and recollection, the film escapes from a single, linear narrative and demands that we look at it again and again, until we notice that it is only from its peripheries that other forms of relations become possible.

While the world tries to advance and grow, desperately trying to keep up with the pace of change, Kosugi’s works make us pause and allow us to experiment with different relations and connections to ourselves and others.