At Palazzo Bollani, in dialogue with the Japan Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025, Japanese photographer and director Mika Ninagawa (Tokyo, 1972) presents “INTERSTICE,” her first European solo exhibition created in collaboration with the collective EiM (Eternity in a Moment). The exhibition, curated by Eriko Kimura and supported by the philanthropic program anonymous art project, configures itself as a phenomenological exploration of the concept of border, understood not as an insurmountable limit, but as a liminal zone of exchange and transformation. The notion of interstice, central to contemporary reflection on the relationship between identity and otherness, recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought on “being-with” as the original condition of humanity: we always exist in interstitial spaces, in the cracks where the self meets the other, where reality merges with the imaginary. Through a multisensory language that integrates photography, light installation and video projection, Ninagawa and the EiM collective construct a perceptual device that allows visitors to physically inhabit this liminal dimension.
Mika Ninagawa with EiM, “Within the Breath of Light and Shadows”, 2025, © Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
The first installation encountered ascending the staircase of Palazzo Bollani, entitled “Within the Breath of Light and Shadow” (2025), configures itself as a reinterpretation of sacred stained glass. At the point of convergence between historical architecture and contemporary intervention, a suspended structure composed of thousands of light points and innumerable ornaments (many of which were handcrafted by the artist herself) generates an immersive space in which the boundary between natural and artificial dissolves in a dance of reflections and transparencies. The artifacts – created with heterogeneous materials ranging from plastic to resin, from crystals to minerals – embody that “vibrant materiality” theorized by Jane Bennett, in which inanimate objects acquire their own agency, a capacity to act upon the world and modify the spectator’s perception. The materiality of the work here becomes a metaphor for a dialectical tension between permanence and transience, between the culturally attributed value of “noble” materials and that conferred on objects of contemporary popular culture. In this scenario, the amalgamation of precious elements and modest accessories transfigures the hierarchical distinction between “high” and “low” art, between toy and jewel. The installation activates a perceptual mechanism in which each element, thanks to the interaction with natural light coming from the east and west windows of the palace, generates ever-new configurations throughout the day. Furthermore, the artificial lighting system programmed to respond to the presence of visitors transforms the work into a reactive organism that breathes and pulsates in synergy with the bodies traversing the space, creating an osmosis between the artistic artifact and human presence through an evocative redistribution of the relationships between visible and invisible, expressible and inexpressible.
Mika Ninagawa with EiM, “Within the Breath of Light and Shadows”, 2025, © Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
In the second hall, the installation “Remnants of Life” (2025) explores the borderland between life and death through a series of photographic images of artificial flowers taken by Ninagawa in cemeteries around the world. The images, printed in large format on light and transparent fabrics, assume the vertical form of tombstones, but contradict the hardness of marble with the softness and mobility of fabric. The artistic gesture is configured as a poetic transfiguration of the funerary object: the artificial flower, brought to the tomb as a sign of resistance to oblivion and transience, symbolizes a memory that, despite its artificiality, is an authentic expression of a desire for permanence. Not by chance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of perception as a “field of presences” in which the visible is always imbued with the invisible, where what appears carries the traces of what is absent. The surface of the work configures itself as a mutable diaphragm: when light directly strikes the fabrics, the images appear clear and defined; when illumination diminishes, the figures become evanescent and indistinguishable. This dynamic of appearance and dissolution recalls Derrida’s concept of “spectrality,” that condition of presence-absence that characterizes the relationship with memory and mourning. The visitors are invited to immerse themselves in a sentient environment where their passage, generating slight air currents that animate the fabrics, makes human presence an integral part of the work’s perceptual ecosystem. In this process, moreover, one intuits a sedimentation of overlapping cultural meanings: the practice of floral offerings to the deceased, common to geographically distant cultures, is reread through the lens of the contemporary attitude to produce simulacra and artificial substitutes.
Mika Ninagawa with EiM, “Remnants of Life”, 2025, © Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
The exhibition path concludes with the video installation “Dream of the Beyond in the Abyss” (2025), set up in a space that simultaneously evokes a chapel or a prehistoric cave, liminal places par excellence, suspended between immanence and transcendence. The projection, composed of sequences filmed in different locations and diffused by multiple projectors onto draped veils that entirely envelop the room, creates a visual flow in which natural and artificial elements follow one another without interruption: from Japanese cherry blossoms to fireworks, from airport scenes to aquatic settings. This visual structure allows for the exploration of the spatio-temporal dimension of the interstice, amplifying those moments of transition in which different and sometimes contradictory meanings coexist in a state of potentiality. In this way, a short circuit is created between the particular and the universal, between the culturally situated subjective experience and the aspiration to a language capable of transcending geographical and cultural boundaries. Ninagawa’s artistic project, while not having the explicit objective of representing Japanese culture, inevitably draws nourishment from its cultural substrate. In particular, the sensitivity toward ephemeral beauty and the aesthetic valorization of transience that unite the various works recall the aesthetic concept of mono no aware (“pathos of things”), which designates a strong emotional participation in the beauty of nature and life and the consequent nostalgic sensation tied to its incessant change. This fascination with evanescence paradoxically fuels a search for permanence that expresses itself through artificial means: photography that crystallizes the instant, installation that simulates cyclical temporality, video that captures movement to return it in an eternal present.
Mika Ninagawa with EiM, “Dreams of the beyond in the abyss”, 2025, © Mika Ninagawa, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery
The interstitial space explored by Mika Ninagawa and the EiM collective is therefore not only that between natural and artificial, between life and death, between material and immaterial, but also that between individuality and collectivity. Significant in this sense is, for example, the creative process adopted in “Within the Breath of Light and Shadow,” an installation composed of ornaments created or collected individually by the artist, whose assembly required collective (primarily female) labor. On this level, the interstice becomes a metaphor for a relational modality of artistic creation that surpasses the authorial paradigm to embrace a communal and participatory dimension. While this work interrogates the dialectic between permanence and transience through materiality transformed by light, “Remnants of Life” addresses the paradox of the synthetic immortality of artificial flowers, constitutively ambiguous between life and death. In “Dream of the Beyond in the Abyss,” instead, the boundary between real and virtual dissolves in an immersive environment where images of natural and artificial phenomena merge in a transcultural cyclicity. By virtue of this, “INTERSTICE” configures itself as a poetic exploration of the fissures that traverse our experience of the world: those between different cultures, between dissonant temporalities, between materiality and digitization, between individualism and interconnection. In the full Anthropocene, in which the boundaries between human and non-human, between natural and technological become increasingly permeable, the work of Ninagawa and EiM invites us to consciously inhabit these interstitial spaces, recognizing them not as voids to be filled but as generative places of meaning and relation.
Info:
Mika NINAGAWA with EiM: INTERSTICE
Curated by Eriko Kimura
11/05/2025 – 21/07/2025
Palazzo Bollani
Riva degli Schiavoni, 3647 – Venezia
www.palazzobollani.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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