Bottom floor of Shibuya's Sega Gigo game center
Runs indefinitely
Saturday May 27, the same day as the opening of the massive Africa Remix exhibition at Mori Art Museum, a singular art-intervention-cum-exhibition appeared inside a block of baggage-lockers on the bottom floor of Shibuya's Sega Gigo arcade. Initiated by Belgian Artist Eric van Hove, "Off the Record" hijacks X-cube, a new locker system that has recently appeared around Tokyo in which multiple users can exchange packages by using cellphone numbers as keys.
Instead of parcels, Van Hove (www.transcri.be) has installed artworks in two dozen of the lockers, several by artists that were included in "Africa Remix." After placing each of the pieces in a locker, he invited individuals to stop by the lockers and use their cellphones to open and view one of them. Each visitor is then requested to enter the number of another person into the system, thereby creating what Van Hove has called a "chain reaction guest list."
Among the artists participating in the show are Federico Herrero from Costa Rica, Ahmad Nadalian from Iran, Lara Baladi from Egypt and Soni Kum, a North Korean based in Tokyo. Visitors are encouraged to interact with the works as they like -- eating them, changing them, taking them, etc. Van Hove wants to use the occasion of large exhibitions in Tokyo to invite visiting artists from abroad to contribute, and hopes that each locker will continue to host its own mini-exhibition as long as the works remain intact and guests invite others to view them. So if you're well connected or lucky, you just might get a call in the coming weeks or months.
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