Taka Ishii Gallery
Closes May 23
Scarred rocks and dank underground waterways don't bring to mind the bright lights and skyscrapers of our urban imagination. In Hatakeyama Naoya's photographs showing at the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo's Kiyosumi-Shirakawa till May 23, though, these dark, hidden spaces ask where is the line that separates nature from the human interventions that confine it.
"Ciel Tombe" — literally "Fallen Sky" — is a photographic series created in Paris last year. Conjuring graveyards and cavelike altars, the subterranean world depicted shows the few remaining mines from which Parisians scavenged the limestone with which to build what French critic Walter Benjamin described as "the capital of the 19th century." Hatakeyama represented Japan at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and while stylistically familiar, "Ciel Tombe" presents the well-known photographer's oeuvre on a more global — even cosmic — scale. The artist's notes to the exhibition recall stories in which the sky and the center of the earth are not continuous, but actual separate entities, as in not only the worldview of ancient mythologies, but also in the futuristic imagination of Jules Vernes' 19th-century science fiction.
For Hatakeyama, this man-made underground universe is a metaphor for the city. In a hauntingly simple comment, deftly capturing the inner atmosphere of the exhibition, a passage from his notebook observes: "It is not simply by chance that the pillars which are meant to keep the sky from falling are called totems. Only those who imagine the beginning of the world, also imagine its end."