Invisible Concern

In autumn 2019, the Forum’s curator, Reiko Setsuda, offers carte blanche to Guillaume Désanges, her colleague at La Verrière in Brussels, for an exhibition. Désanges brings to Tokyo an experimental project on perception, which began in 2018 with Ismaïl Bahri’s solo exhibition, Des gestes à peine déposés dans un paysage agité (Barely placed gestures in a turbulent landscape). The Franco-Tunisian artist’s practice is characterized by minimal interventions and restrained gestures that invite viewers to pay close attention to details, incidents and tiny variations that hover at the very limit of perceptibility. In Tokyo, Bahri transforms the glass building of the Hermès Maison Ginza into an optical apparatus that alternately reveals or hides the outside world. Part of an immersive installation entitled “Invisible Concern”, encompassing videos, objects, paintings and drawings, Bahri’s work foregrounds our perception of light, the back-and-forth between the visible and the invisible, and the ineffable anxiety hidden between the surface of things and all that escapes our gaze.