The Play — Kalejdoskop — Salle Principale — la galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 16 → November 14, 2020

Curators : Yoann Gourmel & Élodie Royer

Staging most of their actions, “without particular reason,” in “natural outdoor spaces,” and admitting they “only like[d] the infinite time and space of open air,” ¹ The Play is a fluctuating art collective that is still active today, gathering individuals with various personalities and skills. It was formed in 1967 in the Japanese Kansai region. Beyond its critique of social and artistic institutions—a typical stance in the 1960s Japanese art scene—the group has constantly devised its own methods for collective actions and the ways for transmitting them, its members coming together to create the possibility of an event without any concern for its result. Rejecting the notion of the artwork as an end, The Play has always stressed its own particular dynamics, based on sharing and on “making-together,” in a physical as well as a spiritual sense, through the staging of ephemeral situations.

Following a large presentation of their actions in the collective exhibition “ Le Mont Fuji n’existe pas ” at Le Plateau / Frac Ile de France, Paris in 2012, this first solo exhibition of the group in France gathers together works from 1969 to 1988. It focuses on the relationships between human beings and their natural or constructed environments through outdoors physical labor, cultivating care for the living, which is still of particular relevance nowadays. Drawings, sketches, posters, photographs and videos, the documents of these actions are presented in a site-specific installation from 1983 entitled Kalejdoskop, which spreads out on the entire gallery floor.

¹ “Comment”, unsigned, reprinted in Play [black cover], trans. Reiko Tomii (Osaka: self-published by The Play, 1981), n.p.