NEW YORK, NY.- The gallery will present Meio Aqui, a solo exhibition of Berlin and São Paulo-based artist Lucas Odahara. The installation, considered by the artist to be an unresolved and rhythmic choreography, brings together various bodies of work which propose alternative mechanisms of self-locating within predetermined and confined identity systems. Within the realms of nationality, race and gender, Odahara searches for openings and closures within and between, replacing impulses of conformity with multiplicity.
Drawing on a family history of immigration and his experiences as a mestiço immigrant across various continents, he considers the condition of being (of being here, of being somewhere, of being anywhere) as a condition which predestines departure. Odahara proposes migration-motions as choreography, a dance happening across oceans. For objects as with bodies, movement is encoded at a structural level: painted ceramic tiles gesture toward the history of tiled murals (once constituting a language of imperial power, and valued for their ability to be shipped in pieces to the colonies).
How is it we call both an object a “belonging”, and an experience “belonging”? A phrase pulled from Odahara’s Intervalos—each created between traveling, and akin to tiling in their collapsibility and transit-properties—reads: “The performance can’t start under these conditions”. Nevertheless, it does not wait.
Brought together with a sort of rhythm in mind — a plan of action goes: exposing,
concealing,
representing,
retreating,
folding,
distancing,
parting,
opening,
closing,
pacing… In this half-here, performances never reach their final form. The body and an idea of the self must fragment in order to keep moving.
By slicing the gallery space with a single running shelf (like a staff for an empty musical score or two halves of a body having been bisected, dismembered, displayed), the gallery’s architecture becomes a spatialized diagram. Some parts of the whole remain safe in their shielded-ness, while others are exposed like a skinless bone. Studies on dancer injuries and their prescribed care-methods have become a microcosm for Odahara to consider structures that damage the body behind a discourse of celebration. What is there to celebrate? What about this is celebratory?
In the rehearsal, no final form ever comes into being— neither with encore nor clapping. In the rehearsal there is still choice, openness, learning, potential, multiplicity. Uncertainty diminishes only slightly. Injuries appropriate in revealing only once in the darkness behind the stage, this division of space imposing on attitude.
Intervalos, again: “one may be exhausted from the American stage and can exit”.
Lucas Odahara (b. 1989, São Paulo) is an artist based between Berlin and São Paulo, In 2022, he was awarded with the Berlin Art Prize and in 2024 he was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands. His work has been exhibited at Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2024); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2023); TaxisPalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Austria (2023); Kleinplastik Triennial Fellbach (2022); OPENART Biennial, Sweden (2022); Cultural Center of Belgrade (2022); Berlinische Galerie (2021); Bärenzwinger, Berlin (2021); Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (2020); Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan (2019); Schwules Museum, Berlin (2017); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2016); Weserburg Bremen (2015); and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2015).
