BERLIN.- Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s Life (Rhizome) exhibition presents his eponymous group of works for the first time in Europe.

In his work Tatsuo Miyajima (born 1957) concerns himself with time and space. Of central importance to him are three considerations: “Keep Changing”, “Connected with everything” and “Continue forever”. The technological raw materials are numeric displays of light emitting diodes (LEDs), so-called gadgets that Tasuo Miyajima developed himself. The number is understood by him as a metaphor for each form of life and transience.

For Life (Rhizome) Tatsuo Miyajima developed a new generation of gadgets in cooperation with Takashi Ikegami, who has researched artificial life for fifteen years at Tokyo University. The number patterns no longer follow a firmly established structure but, like an organism, change completely unpredictably.

Comparable to Gilles Deuleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concept of the Rhizome, defined as metaphor for a new model for the organisation of science and cosmography and supplanting older tree-metaphor-representations of hierarchical structures, the Life (Rhizome) works weave units and multiplicity into one another. Neither one LED exists before or above another nor does one or the other annihilate the other. Nothing exists without the other. In Rhizomes crossings and intersections are possible. An element can be part of several levels of organisation and cross connections are permitted. Rhizome also ultimately means the liberation from defined power structures: many perspectives and many approaches can be freely linked.

In his work Life (Rhizome) Tatsuo Miyajima attains a new complexity between technological precision and contemplation, between philosophical models and artistic concepts.

Important works by the artist are represented in collections at the Tate Gallery, London, the Bavarian State Picture Collection Munich, the La Caixa Barcelona, the Deste Foundation Athens, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Leeum in Seoul and the Kunstmuseum Bern.