Alfredo Jaar + Reijiro Wada Exhibition
SCAI Piramide
Starts 1/21
SHARE
Artists
Alfredo Jaar, Reijiro Wada
Two artists, working at the fragile limits of a world on the brink, converge in a configuration that is at once lucid and precariously unstable. Alfredo Jaar, artist and photographer, distills political catastrophe into a minimalist language that exposes unseen architectures of power. Reijiro Wada incorporates processes of decay, collision, and material transformation into his work, presenting sculpture as a site that quietly unsettles its surrounding environment. Between Jaar’s political minimalism and Wada’s metaphysical materiality, the exhibition asks viewers to trace the fault lines between global crisis and intimate perception, and to consider how those fractures shape the way they think.
In a dimly lit gallery, Alfredo Jaar’s neon piece Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2023/2025) hangs like an unresolved verdict. Shown previously as a public address on large-scale digital displays such as London’s Piccadilly Circus and Seoul’s COEX Square, the phrase—borrowed from feminist poet Adrienne Rich—burns with anxious clarity. Confronting realities that no aesthetic logic can adequately process, the work questions art’s strained capacity in the face of catastrophe. The stark white glow, stripped of sentiment, stands as both a poetic line and a refusal of lyric temptation, suggesting that language has reached the limits of its ability to respond to the violence and devastation of the present.
Placed in juxtaposition, four black picture frames lean against the wall. One holds a black painted in black, another remains empty, a third contains a receding cascade of nested frames, and the last frames a mirror. Echoing an earlier work presented at documenta 8 in 1987—where gilded frames and photographs of distant tragedies were brought into uneasy proximity—1+1+1+1 (2025), first presented in this exhibition, returns to the politics of gallery display where the act of seeing drifts into an ethical and cognitive register. Between emptiness and self-reflection, each proposition suggests a different approach to perceiving the world, and the viewer finds themselves held in this quiet impasse, aware of how they are positioned as a spectator.
Reijiro Wada’s new work Portal (2025) extends his long-standing exploration of landscape, optics, and entropy through a quietly destabilising sculptural gesture. The work consists of two tempered glass plates sealed within a solid brass frame and supported by the inverted bronze cast of a dead grapevine. Between the sheets, a volume of clear
grappa exerts a subtle negative pressure, bending the glass and the light passing through it. The world on the other side shivers—not metaphorically, but optically—making the air appear tense or thinned. The scene beyond trembles—not metaphorically, but optically—making the air appear tense, even thinned. While evoking cycles of material ending and return, the vitality of the grape is sublimated into an ethereal energy with a lucid, transparent intensity.
Across the exhibition, light, glass, and metal are assembled as media that register the stresses of the present, while a recurring formal reference to the square frame runs throughout. Political language and material implication intersect, indicating that every visual experience is already structured by given constraints and guided toward particular ways of seeing. To look through a “frame” is to confront how one’s own vantage point constructs the conditions under which others can appear. The exhibition brings this to light through the tense relation between sculpture and the viewer standing before it, making palpable the latent boundaries that mediate every encounter.
In a dimly lit gallery, Alfredo Jaar’s neon piece Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2023/2025) hangs like an unresolved verdict. Shown previously as a public address on large-scale digital displays such as London’s Piccadilly Circus and Seoul’s COEX Square, the phrase—borrowed from feminist poet Adrienne Rich—burns with anxious clarity. Confronting realities that no aesthetic logic can adequately process, the work questions art’s strained capacity in the face of catastrophe. The stark white glow, stripped of sentiment, stands as both a poetic line and a refusal of lyric temptation, suggesting that language has reached the limits of its ability to respond to the violence and devastation of the present.
Placed in juxtaposition, four black picture frames lean against the wall. One holds a black painted in black, another remains empty, a third contains a receding cascade of nested frames, and the last frames a mirror. Echoing an earlier work presented at documenta 8 in 1987—where gilded frames and photographs of distant tragedies were brought into uneasy proximity—1+1+1+1 (2025), first presented in this exhibition, returns to the politics of gallery display where the act of seeing drifts into an ethical and cognitive register. Between emptiness and self-reflection, each proposition suggests a different approach to perceiving the world, and the viewer finds themselves held in this quiet impasse, aware of how they are positioned as a spectator.
Reijiro Wada’s new work Portal (2025) extends his long-standing exploration of landscape, optics, and entropy through a quietly destabilising sculptural gesture. The work consists of two tempered glass plates sealed within a solid brass frame and supported by the inverted bronze cast of a dead grapevine. Between the sheets, a volume of clear
grappa exerts a subtle negative pressure, bending the glass and the light passing through it. The world on the other side shivers—not metaphorically, but optically—making the air appear tense or thinned. The scene beyond trembles—not metaphorically, but optically—making the air appear tense, even thinned. While evoking cycles of material ending and return, the vitality of the grape is sublimated into an ethereal energy with a lucid, transparent intensity.
Across the exhibition, light, glass, and metal are assembled as media that register the stresses of the present, while a recurring formal reference to the square frame runs throughout. Political language and material implication intersect, indicating that every visual experience is already structured by given constraints and guided toward particular ways of seeing. To look through a “frame” is to confront how one’s own vantage point constructs the conditions under which others can appear. The exhibition brings this to light through the tense relation between sculpture and the viewer standing before it, making palpable the latent boundaries that mediate every encounter.
Schedule | Jan 21 (Wed) 2026-Apr 18 (Sat) 2026 Opening Hours Information
| ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | https://www.scaithebathhouse.com/en/exhibitions/2026/01/alfredo_jaar_reijiro_wada/ | ||||
| Venue | SCAI Piramide https://www.scaithebathhouse.com/en/ | ||||
| Location | 3F Piramide Bldg., 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032 | ||||
| Access | 1 minute walk from exit 1a or 1b at Roppongi Station on the Hibiya or Toei Oedo line. | ||||
| Phone | 03-3821-1144 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
Back to Articles
SHARE
No comments yet