Takashima Megumi｜Kasahara Emiko “DR 2019-”
The exhibition introduces Emiko Kasahara’s project of running over coins from different countries with railway tracks to destroy uniformity and visualize power, violence, and identity.Summary
The exhibition “DR 2019-” employs modern capitalism and its infrastructure, the railway, to destroy the value of currency and interrogate the relationship between state and individual identity, the violent transformation experienced by indigenous peoples and immigrants or refugees, and the power and violence inherent in bureaucratic archives. Emiko Kasahara advanced from “OFFERING” at the Yokohama Triennale 2014 to “TSR 2014” on the Trans‑Siberian Railway, then to “CER 2015” on the Chinese Eastern Railway and “TCR 2018” on the Trans‑Continental Railroad, culminating in “DR 2019-” using the tracks of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. In the show, coins from various countries—crushed and deformed by the pressure of wheels and rails—are arranged in cases, while a grid records railway location codes and country codes. This procedure functions as a metaphor that distorts the state symbolism imprinted on coins and reduces the lives of mobile, exploited individuals to codes of “place of origin” and “place of death,” thereby visualizing the violence of archives. As an “artery of empire,” the railway simultaneously destroys cultures and lives while enforcing state homogeneity; the work confronts the viewer with the contradictions of reconstructing individuality and difference within this coercive order.
(Source：artscape)