MUNICH.- Haus der Kunst, Munich is presenting a new site-specific exhibition by the radical Japanese collective Dumb Type. Founded in 1984, Dumb Type’s multifaceted installations and performances critique a highly “informatised” consumer society that is rendered passive or mute by the unceasing deluge of data and technological development: individuals who are “overwhelmed with information yet unaware of anything” (Teiji Furuhashi). Through this approach to communication – often working across multiple languages, speaking in gibberish or attempting to communicate indirectly via technology – Dumb Type have always pushed back against attempts of stereotyping; either with respect to the group’s practitioners, or to their work across hitherto immutable categories as those of nationality, gender or ableism.

The presentation at Haus der Kunst is centred around three specially conceived installations. The sound sculpture Playback is an evolving installation whose sonic form perpetually responds to the time and place in which it is exhibited. The current iteration at Haus der Kunst features a unique soundscape specially created by Japanese composer Ryūichi Sakamoto. He commissioned people from sixteen cities throughout the world to take field recordings of their urban surroundings. Based on these, Sakamoto and Dumb Type have crafted a composition that transforms the gallery into an ever-evolving musing on the concepts of memory and association; distance and desire. In a further nod towards creating connections across times and geographies, these field recordings also form part of the installation Dumb Type has contributed to the Japan Pavilion at the concurrent La Biennale di Venezia.




The huge video installation MEMORANDUM OR VOYAGE combines scenes from three of Dumb Type’s most iconic performances. At the heart of the work lies the question of knowledge and agency, and in particular, our ability as cognizant beings to be able to tell the difference between idealized and material truths, fantasy and reality, life and death. Time and its discontinuity is also a constituent factor in the room-size installation Trace/React II. Using an AI bot programmed to search for words related to the fundamental concepts of “Love”, “Sex”, “Death”, “Money”, and “Life”, the resulting installation completely immerses the viewer in a disconcerting swirl of words, posing questions as to our ability to decipher reality in a world which is increasingly being shaped by digital and artificial “intelligences”.

All three installations can be seen to critically interrogate the manner in which digital media and technology now constitute a formative and irrevocable part of lived experience. Conflating the past with the future, the exhibition compels viewers to engage in alternating acts of attentive listening, reading and watching. In so doing, the presentation recalls the state of liminality (“ma” in Japanese), a state of inertia or nothingness that is principally derived from a surfeit of meaning. At the centre of Dumb Type’s practice is an ongoing concern with the intersection of technological progress and the body. Dumb Type’s visionary performances and installations have been at the leading edge of debates concerning identity and sexual politics in Japan and the wider world, directly confronting audiences with taboo subjects such as identity formation, the pervasiveness of surveillance/ communication technologies, or the trauma wrought by global health crises such as HIV/AIDS, an endemic which tragically claimed the life of one of their founders, Teiji Furuhashi, in 1995.

Collaboration has always been a key element of Dumb Type’s practice. Over a hundred artists have worked with Dumb Type in some capacity over the years, including the likes of Takamine Tadasu, Norico Sunayama, Takao Kawaguchi, Peter Golightly, Bubu de la Madeleine, the OK Girls, Ryoji Ikeda, Min Tanaka and most recently Ryūichi Sakamoto. The visionary Japanese sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, whose retrospective is shown simultaneously at Haus der Kunst, was an early champion of Dumb Type’s practice, while Nakaya herself would often cite Dumb Type as one of the most exciting “next generation” collectives working at the intersection of art and technology.