Catastrophe is… unseeable Nirvana! (2025)
In a darkened space the performance Catastrophe is... Unseeable Nirvana, is co-performed with Aase Nielsen expanding choreography into improvised sonic chaos between a theremin and an electric guitar, glitches and liminal echoes. Attuning to the sensibilities lying in Tsujimura’s archival material Body_hacker underscores its present transformative potential.
The performance was part of the exhibition Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimurapresents the Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada in collaboration with two Denmark-based artists: composer and sound artist Aase Nielsen, and performance artist Body_hacker. Together, they explore the legacy of the groundbreaking Japanese dancer and performer Kazuko Tsujimura (1941–2004).
Kazuko Tsujimura was part of Japan’s post-war avant-garde, active from the 1960s onward. She participated in a number of collaborations, groups, and collectives across art forms and introduced the concept of ‘dance without body, without dance’. Despite her extensive oeuvre, Tsujimura’s groundbreaking work was largely overlooked by history. A rich archive of photographic material from performances, shows, and fragmented installations remained untouched in stacked boxes at her brother’s home until 2017, when artist and researcher Yoshiko Shimada ensured the transfer of the materials to the archive of Keio University Art Center in Tokyo.
In Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura, this archival material is presented to the public for the first time. The title of the exhibition weaves together Tsujimura’s lifelong artistic and spiritual explorations of body, dance, and movement with Yoshiko Shimada’s innovative performance and archival practice – across time and space. For decades, Shimada has worked to highlight overlooked practices of female artists and has reactivated artistic kinships in her own works through performance and reinterpretation of concepts, identities, and bodies.
The exhibition at HEIRLOOM showcases selected parts of Tsujimura’s extensive photographic archive alongside Shimada’s reinterpretations, in combination with new performance- and sound-based works by Body_hacker and Aase Nielsen. Here, archive and body meet, as the artists collectively evoke the sensibility embedded within the archive – through explorations of ideas around transgression and transfeminine expression in Tsujimura’s conceptual artistic practice. Her oeuvre is recontextualised through performances, reenactments, and interventions in the exhibition space, and the exhibition explores themes such as rituals, spiritual practice, kinship, and collective memory.
Credits:
curated by and texts by bluestockings (BS)
performed at Heirloom Center for Art and Archives, Copenhagen, Denmark the 28th June 2025
photo documentation by Malle Madsen, and courtesy Heirloom and Bluestockings (bs)