Nerhol

Household Vestiges

Current
Roppongi
1 February (Sat) –15 March (Sat), 2025
12:00 - 19:00 Closed on Sun, Mon and National Holidays

Opening reception:February 1, 17:00-19:00

Nerhol are an artist duo formed in 2007 by Yoshihisa Tanaka (b.1980) and Ryuta Iida (b.1981). Based on a material process of carving into stacks of sequential photographs of people, Nerhol’s work has expanded in recent years to include naturalized plants, petrified wood, and documentary footage as they continue their unique investigations into time and space. Through efforts to address the migration of plants, and the production of physical materials resulting from fieldwork, Nerhol expose the time axis inherent within these subjects while also expanding their practice into fields such as sociology, history, and cultural anthropology. This exhibition, Household Vestiges, builds upon the pair’s past creative activities and features a collection of work developed out of extracted elements from familiar structural units such as the home or household. Nerhol’s work discovers within these elements a web of relationships that transcends individual characteristics, such as layers of time as well as latent historical and epochal contexts.

Within the gallery space, a stack of printed A3-size paper is piled on the floor. This pile of paper is a single film, printed as approximately 15,000 still images and stacked vertically to a height of 120 centimeters. When viewed from the side, a noisy accumulation of colors emerges, symbolically expressing the pair’s attempt to perceive things from a completely different perspective. A wide variety of items from a single home—DVDs, movies, home videos, postcards, and more—can be seen as an expression of the individuality of the members of the household while also existing as part of larger contexts unfolding in the background. Using the small framework of the family as a foothold, Nerhol observe the world by moving between infinitesimal and infinite, chance and inevitability, a perspective which paradoxically also seems to connect to a depiction of the contours of a specific home.

In addition, this exhibition will feature work with a thistle motif from Naturalized Species, a series the duo have been working on since 2020, and new work that combines a recent photo of a Douglas Fir tree with a postcard found by chance in the artist’s home. In this piece, the images of the two trees photographed in completely different times and physical spaces appear to be connected within the picture plane, evoking a sense of a grander timeline linked by the perspective of plant migration that takes place over hundreds of years.

This exhibition is an opportunity to survey the developments of Nerhol’s artistic practice and serves as a prologue to their solo exhibition planned for July 2025 at The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. With time and space as core themes, Nerhol seek a foothold in larger perspectives and contexts. We invite you to share in the results of their constantly developing practice and the new frontiers onto which it unfolds.

"Piano sonata 01", 2025

"connecticut", 2025

"Canvas (Oasa)", 2025

"Solanum americanum", 2024

"Cirsium vulgare", 2024