Takuro Someya Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Digitalis or First-Person Camera, a group exhibition featuring artists and filmmakers Umi Ishihara, Maiko Endo, Yokna Hasegawa and Mayumi Hosokura, opening Saturday, April 17th.

The four artists included in this exhibition each work in distinct fields and genres of film, and are brought together for the first time by Mayumi Hosokura’s curation. Through the use of the first-person perspective in each work, we are provided with an opportunity to reconsider the act of “seeing” in today’s world.

All of the video works, installations, and photographs that comprise Digitalis or First-Person Camera were made specifically for this exhibition.

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The following is a brief exhibition statement by Mayumi Hosokura.

Digitalis or First-Person Camera

In a passage from Yumiko Oshima’s graphic novel Digitalis, a character describes seeing “amorphous luminous bodies which appear out of nowhere when I force my eyes closed, unable to sleep… I named the biggest and brightest one ‘digitalis.’”
This hyper-personal description of vision lies somewhere between the reality and phenomenon of sight, yet I have no way to prove that the world I see now is any different from that of digitalis. We live our days seeing through our personal gaze, our eyes clouding over when we cry.
The camera is regarded as an objective recording device with a mechanical eye. Yet at the same time, it can also be seen as a tool that is capable of sharing the personal vision of the person behind the camera.
When we reconceive the camera this way, it becomes possible for us to encounter someone else’s digitalis, as though tracing the back of their eyes.
Digitalis, or the first-person camera, is a question asking what lies beyond the gaze traced backward, blurring the boundary between you and me.
— Mayumi Hosokura

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Digitalis or First-Person Camera｜Umi Ishihara, Maiko Endo, Yokna Hasegawa, Mayumi Hosokura
Exhibition Period：Saturday, April 17, 2021 – Saturday, May 29
Closed for Holiday：Saturday, May 1 – Wednesday, May 5
Open：Tue, Wed, Thu, Sat 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.｜Fri 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Closed：Sun, Mon and National Holidays

Takuro Someya Contemporary Art
TSCA 3F TERRADA Art Complex 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa Shinagawa-ku Tokyo 140-0002

TEL 03-6712-9887 ｜FAX 03-4578-0318 ｜E-MAIL: gallery@tsca.jp

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Umi Ishihara
Umi Ishihara is an artist and film director making experimental narrative films and video installations centered around love, personal memories, womanhood and wider societal issues. Both her first feature-length film The Garden Apartment (2019) and her Tokyo University of the Arts thesis The Pioneer premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019. The same year, she directed Janitor of Lunacy commissioned by BBC and aired on BBC4, and was selected for the 2019 Bloomberg New Contemporaries for UMMMI’s Lonely Girl. In 2016, she was awarded the Teiya Iwabuchi Award by the Contemporary Art Foundation in Japan.

©️Umi Ishihara

Maiko Endo
Film director and artist Maiko Endo was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1981 and grew up in Tokyo. She moved to New York in 2000 and started her career as a violinist, performing in orchestras and bands as well as composing music for films. Her directorial debut KUICHISAN (2011) was awarded Best World Documentary at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in 2012. Endo’s second feature TECHNOLOGY was filmed in India and Iceland. Her new mid-length film TOKYO TELEPATH 2020 premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020, followed by the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2020. Endo is currently based in Tokyo where she is at work on her next feature-length film. In 2021, she will also take a step into the art world with her first video installation.

©️Maiko Endo

Yokna Hasegawa
Yokna Hasegawa (b.1985) began publishing prose and film works on the internet in the 2000s. In 2013, Hasegawa received the Honorable Mention Award from Canon New Cosmos of Photography for Ascension River. Other directorial works include Illuminations (2014) and DUAL CITY (2015), the first two parts of an SF trilogy set in a Japan of the near future, as well as The Pearl Diver’s Tale (2020), a short film based on a poem which imagines two women divers, one from Hokusai’s shunga and the other from an Asuka period legend, as the same person. In 2017, she participated in the 9th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. Hasegawa’s primary goal is to document the environment, but she is also interested in exploring and sharing the emotions, especially related to memory, and tactile sensations of image which arise through the misuse of film techniques, such as the misalignment of audio and video, fictionalization through CG and dialogue, the shooting of meaningless primary source material, and excessive time manipulation.

©️Yokna Hasegawa

Mayumi Hosokura
In Mayumi Hosokura’s work, representations of the body reorganize boundaries that would once have been taken as fact, such as those between race and nationality, humans and animals and machines, and organic and inorganic material.
Hosokura studied literature at the University of Ritsumeikan and photography at the Nihon University College of Art. Major solo exhibitions include NEW SKIN, Mumei, Tokyo (2019), Jubilee, nomad nomad, Hong Kong (2017), Cyalium, G/P gallery, Tokyo (2016), CRYSTAL LOVE STARLIGHT, G/P gallery, Tokyo (2014), and Transparency is the new mystery, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2012). Major group exhibitions include The Body Electric, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2020), Things So Faint But Real: Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 15, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Toko (2018), Close to the Edge: New Photography from Japan, Miyako Yoshinage, New York (2016), Tokyo International Photography Festival, Art Factory Jonanjima, Tokyo (2015), and Reflected – Works from the Foam Collection, Foam Amsterdam, Amsterdam (2014). Hosokura has published numerous photobooks, including Jubilee, artbeat publishers (2017), transparency is the new mystery, MACK (2016), and KYOTO by Mayumi Hosokura, Louis Vuitton (2021). Her work belongs to the public collection at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, among others.
Hosokura is currently participating in the group exhibition Anneke Hymmen & Kumi Hiroi, Tokuko Ushioda, Mari Katayama, Maiko Haruki, Mayumi Hosokura and Your Perspectives, on view at Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo until April 18th, 2021.

©️Mayumi Hosokura

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Our Commitment to Safety During COVID-19
In order to prevent the further spread of COVID-19, we will take the following actions:

- All visitors will be required to wear a mask upon entry into the gallery.
- All visitors will be asked to disinfect their hands with alcohol spray at the entrance.
- Entrance will be limited when needed to prevent overcrowding.
- We ask that anyone with the following symptoms refrain from visiting the gallery:
＊ Temperature over 37 degrees Celsius
＊ Cold symptoms (including fever, coughing, sneezing, sore throat)
＊ Strong fatigue or difficulty breathing
＊ Received a COVID-19 diagnosis or been in close recent contact with someone who has received a COVID-19 diagnosis
＊ Other concerns about their health
- Gallery staff will monitor their health and temperatures daily as well as take part in other preventative measures such as wearing masks while working.
- Please note that changing circumstances may require us to temporarily halt entrance or close the gallery. In the event of such a situation, we ask for your understanding and cooperation.