I hear your breath in 4/4

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix

11 February - 24 March

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of Shino Yanai, an emerging multimedia artist based in London. Yanai creates installations of videos, photography and sound, often her performance as the subject of the installations, recorded with various media. For the upcoming exhibition, The basement gallery serves as a venue for the audience to vicariously experience by way of video and audio, the hypnotic performance that rolled out at the Tokyo Biennale in the summer of 2021. At the ground floor gallery, new prints and other works shed light on the artist’s take on new ways to conceive the world, created during the the periods when pandemic-related various restrictions on life were imposed.
Yanai presents us unique perspective of the world through her practice which increasingly incorporates the sound aspect of life, whether it is music, environmental audio or general noise, while examining and reconstructing the lived experience or performance with conscious attention to the physicality of body. Her practice reminds us of how a place, either present or past, is inseparably linked to sound and her sound always has the bodily, or physical resonance.
In the main video work ‘Well Temperament’ created with a composer and performer Ken Ikeda, the artist’s own breath during her run at and around the centre of London sets the audio base throughout the duration of the video, at 4/4, a musical time signature for four beats per measure. The everlasting, steady beat of footsteps blends in with environmental noise and other elements that are also recorded while running, almost to an intoxicating effect.