​Waugh Office was established in 2011 by Julia and Mark Waugh.
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A hybrid platform. working with curators, writers, theorists and artists to smudge
cultural differences and attitudes across physical and national borders.
. Pushing the programme, exploring the traffic in ideas that are nomadic,
with a focus on perceptions rather than stereotypes and assumptions.
We come to play, escape prejudice and shout for renegade
values of the unfixable, broken and unhomely.
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© Waugh Office 2024.
Hiromi Nakajima
Pump Prax Tokyo/Normandie
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Hiromi Nakajima
​Pump Prax Tokyo/Normandie 2021
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Artist Hiromi Nakajima live streamed a reading from the book Short Notes, this event took place at Infinity Books Tokyo. The global lockdown of 2021 prevented members of the public being present, creating an opportunity to explore a new appetite for online "Happenings". Hiromi Nakajima's writings are often intimate, so the the absence of others in the performance space, added to this new normality of online togetherness: a redesign in what community might mean.
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The second part replicated a traditional exhibition space in an empty room of a French Manor during, this space empty and decayed, seemed post-apocalyptic an idea at this time much the subject of Social Media speculation felt, a real possibility. As with the performance, this event had no audience, seen via documentation preserved on YouTube and Instagram.
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"Therefore, the dynamics of image endorses a question: Is what you see what I see? That is the manifestation that revolves in my thoughts to begin with. Since the colours and lines have the theatrical effects which forcefully stretches the meanings by means of shifting its angles, the kinship with these materials of painting can transform into the interpretation of an aesthetic organism: that recycling what it has become for what it will be, through your eyes and experiences towards cognition." - Hiromi Nakajima
I imagine a flight to Tokyo, the seats are full, this centuries quest for distant travel.
I imagine people, other places, different sounds, did someone cough?
​I imagine a gallery, paintings on the walls, in fluid colours of biology.
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The windows are white in the photos, as if the room suspends on clouds, a ship of pictures that floats on invisible waves conjured by the masts of a 5G tower.
Do you believe in telepathy, or did this exhibition by Hiromi Nakajima entitled Pump Prax really happened? The thoughts of this artist: "an abandoned room in the French countryside", walls of mud and straw, paintings pinned and blu-taked to damp surfaces that fell and fluttered onto a dusty floor?
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Do you believe in ghosts?
I was told the images suggest the interior of a living body, but the artist was absent and there is no audience. Realities of doing and being creative that for Hannah Arendt makes for freedom in life, finds resonance in an empty space that is only accessed on Social Media. ​
I try to shift focus as the world becomes designed through prescription, whether actual or ephemeral, this is the dawning of the age of biotechnologies that paradoxically, put limits to experience as we forget proximity ... looking through, looking in, looking out, looking at a mobile phone.
Waugh Office was established in 2011 by Julia Waugh and Mark Waugh,
as a hybrid platform curating exhibitions, events and publications internationally
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© Waugh Office 2024.