Kosuke Nagata

Solo Exhibition

Becoming Salmon

2025.3.15（Sat）- 4.12（Sat）

Opening hours：12:00 – 18:00
Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and holidays
*In conjunction with Takuro Tamayama Solo Exhibition Intervenes / Light and Table / Sound as Time / Hole

Opening Reception: 3.15 (Sat) 17:30 – 19:00
Takuro Tamayama x Kosuke Nagata Opening Talk Session: 3.15 (Sat) 16:00 – 17:30

We at ANOMALY are pleased to announce our upcoming solo exhibition of works by Kosuke Nagata titled Becoming Salmon, from March 15 (Sat.) to April 12 (Sat.), 2025.
Nagata is an up-and-coming artist who makes reinterpretations and updates of the institution of (or questions in) art history, and depicts the effects and issues caused by the good and bad sides of rationalization in the form of systems and technologies, all with a technique brimming with wit.
This is Nagata’s first solo exhibition at ANOMALY in the three years since Equilibres, which was held in October 2021. Centered around Becoming Salmon (2024), his first animated work, and Feasting Wild (2025), a new photographic work, the exhibition will retrace his activities with a focus on human beings, animals, plants, and the ecological and economic system surrounding them.

At Equilibres, his former solo exhibition held at ANOMALY, Nagata connected the eponymous series produced in the 1980s by the Swiss artist duo Fischli & Weiss to the information environment and technology of the present, and provided a new interpretation of it. The works composing the Equilibres (meaning “balance” in French) series consists of photographs of three-dimensional objects produced by assembling everyday items. Nagata regards these works as “sculptures circulating as images.” In his view, these works, which are photographed, recorded, and titled just as if they were sculptures, humorously expose the “happening” nature of sculptures. They have an inverted structure; the original three-dimensional object (≈ work) does not exist, but its photograph, which may even be termed a copy of it, acquires value as a piece of art.
In this exhibition, Nagata examined Equilibres in the context of the current media environment and reproduction technology. He attempted to grasp the problem of image in the present day through “sculptured works circulating as image” produced in the mass-media age of the 1980s.

Nagata has also been tackling issues surrounding food, such as identity politics, biopolitics, and colonialism, through research related to dietary culture. Based on these interests, he has been producing video essays and showing performances modeled on the format of full-course meals.

Purée (2020) rested on the results of Nagata’s historical research on the French food purée. It depicted the relationship among bodies intaking it, the utensils assisting this intake, and other bodies. Purée is now often used in care for people who cannot freely ingest food, such as the aged, infants, and toddlers. In contrast, in the Middle Ages, it was a food that flaunted power, because it left the job of chewing to the cook or slaves. For Nagata, cooking is not merely the processing of foodstuffs; it is a political platform where power relationships come into play.

Feasting Wild (2022-) is based on Nagata’s studies of the control of the life of plants and animals in farms and fisheries, in forms such as selective breeding, domestication, and resource management. The complex entanglement of people with animals and plants in the production of foodstuffs is shown along with the serving of full-course meals and text written in the style of menus. This work was first staged in 2022, and also performed at the Becoming Feral exhibition held at the Towada Art Center in 2024.

Becoming Salmon, the centerpiece of this exhibition, is set on the site of a salmon farm, and tells the story of salmon contaminated with parasites and oldsters who have lost their value as part of the workforce. Through the relationship between salmon and people who have fallen out of the culturing system, it depicts the exploitation transcending species in the culturing business and the ties, albeit distorted, that are nurtured there. The exhibition will also show a video work titled How to Become Salmon (2024), which recorded a conversation among Nagata, a curator, artists, and an anthropologist during the production of Becoming Salmon.
The new work also titled Feasting Wild was made by translating the temporary form of what has been a performance so far, and reconstituting it with photographs (images) and text (written words).

Nagata often brings out works of the same title in differing formats. In this practice can be seen his interest in intermedia, but the formats of the individual works remain solidly within the scope of the conventional ones. His attitude toward format comes into sharper relief when positioned next to the works of Takuro Tamayama in a solo exhibition held for the same period.
Although these two solo exhibitions each compose an independent space in line with the format of a solo exhibition, the respective works “intervene” into each other’s space, at the suggestion of Tamayama, who is holding the other solo exhibition. Tamayama is boldly attempting a display composition swayed by the environment and circumstances, and Kosuke Nagata is striving to connect with society through the conventional exhibition format. These differing approaches may be expected to produce new alternatives to the format of exhibitions and set off a chemical reaction.

It should be added that Nagata was selected to be a finalist in the Second Commission Project for the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025. Fire in Water (2025), a new work produced on commission by the project, is on display at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (until March 23). Make sure not to miss it!

This solo exhibition introduces the recent activities and thoughts of Nagata, who is going to Taiwan for one year under a program for study overseas offered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We hope you will take advantage of the opportunity it presents.

Kosuke Nagata

Born in 1990 in Aichi, Nagata Kosuke is based in Kanagawa. Through photography, moving image, and installation, his practice explores the self and the other, nature and culture, the body and the environment, and other binary oppositions that undergird modern thinking, and their latent ambiguity. His recent work has focused on video essays and performances in the form of meal courses, reflecting on how food culture shapes national identity, the body techniques and power relations contained within table manners, and the control of animal and plant life in food production.
Nagata’s major exhibitions include “Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 – Docs: Images and Records” (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2025),“Becoming Feral“ (Towada Art Center, 2024), “Seeing as though touching: Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.19” TOKYO PHOTOGRAPHIC ART MUSEUM, 2022), “Equilibres” (ANOMALY, 2021), “Eating Body” (Moto-Eigakan, 2021), “Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion” (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 2019), “Open Space 2018: in transition” (NTT InterCommunication Center, 2018), and “The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2018: Mapping the Invisible” (TOKYO PHOTOGRAPHIC ART MUSEUM, 2018). The essay titled ‘Photography after Photoshop: Software of the “Photographic Apparatus”’ contributed to the Lev Manovich’s Japanese-translated publication “Instagram and Contemporary Image” (Tokyo: BNN, 2018).