Kayne Griffin is pleased to present a new exhibition You Must Be Free by Mika Tajima, featuring sculptures, paintings, and a large-scale haptic air installation.
From an early investigation into the regulatory and relational structures of human bodies in built environments, Tajima’s recent work extends her inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy. This exhibition focuses on the necessity and impossibility of freedom in our contemporary moment. The title, You Must Be Free, appears as an external command to achieve freedom and produces a contradictory tension that reveals a social limit to its practice. The speech act presents freedom as a pressing desire and controlling demand on the subject, underlining the entwinement of control and freedom. The animating force of this paradoxical directive is manifested in this exhibition as air pressure and its circulation through contained and porous objects and architecture.
Throughout You Must Be Free, air is exchanged, regulated, injected, and ventilated to produce a conditioned space for objects and bodies.
The Force Touch (Totum Corpus) installation features a central wall expanse perforated with air emitting jet nozzles arranged in acupoint patterns referring to the meridian system in the body and the vital energy thought to flow through channels connecting the skin to internal organs. Transposing a physiological map onto architecture, Force Touch (Totum Corpus) images a bodily system on the exhibition infrastructure and similarly connects an unseen interior to an exposed surface. Drawing on the exhibition as a sensorial space in Michael Asher’s early “air works” in which accelerated air was an invisible sculptural- architectural presence, Force Touch (Totum Corpus) escalates the source and material context of the air pressure introduced into the room. The forced air emitted from the wall structure is produced by a ventilation system designed to dissipate heat created by computer processors in order to maintain high-performance levels. The air jets condition the space and produce a haptic pressure on the body that is prevalent in touchless technology and virtual encounters.
The respiration of air and the regulation of its exchange between internal and external spaces is the subject of the Pranayama series of body-object sculptures. Made with raw materials such as wood, stone, and crystal, each sculpture is pierced to create channels and openings that expose the interior to the outside. Punctured with Jacuzzi jet nozzles, the rose quartz sculptures in this exhibition summon the metaphysical, affective, and therapeutic properties of the material and objects. The works draw on the external imperative to reform the body and the inner spiritual practice of ‘opening’ the mind through psycho-physiological regulation—the scene of the fully targeted self. Pranayama, “control of vital air” in Sanskrit, is the ancient Vedic science of breath in which the pursuit of mental liberation is achieved through respiratory techniques to bring the unconscious autonomic nervous system under voluntary control.

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