Los Angeles-based Japanese artist Koki Tanaka’s first solo show in France.

Koki Tanaka's interdisciplinary art practice - combining painting, video, photography and sculpture - captures the ordinary, everyday event or object in its most poetic transformation.  The artist's task of discovery entails carefully documenting what he has accidentally encountered - things we ordinarily overlook. He documents the behavior unconsciously exhibited by people confronting unusual situations.

A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt)’s scenario begins in a motion capture studio at University of California in Irvine. Five pianists enter and sit at a table, while a film crew records the event on three cameras. The following instruction is written on a white board: “Rule: to play one piano with all the pianists playing together.” The specific theme – a soundtrack for collective engagement – will be given to the pianists when they return the next day to compose the piece live before the cameras. Meanwhile, the group engages in small talk on the subject of their respective areas of expertise. One pianist, the only woman, specializes in improvisational composition; two study classical music; the other two are jazz musicians. What’s brought them together is neither a curricular obligation nor a shared interest in a specific musical genre. Rather, they arrive having answered a performative solicitation – circulated by the conceptual artist Koki Tanaka – to compose and play a piece of music, simultaneously, on film.

A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt) is representative of Koki Tanaka’s approach in which the production of artworks derived from actions, which he instigates in a given site. Sprung from an economy of means and the absurdity of chance, past actions have entailed Tanaka selling old palm fronds as a vendor at a local flea market; showing sculptures to a friend’s dog; or orchestrating a haircut simultaneously performed by a team of hairdressers.

With A Piano Played by Five Pianists (First Attempt), Tanaka takes his “chance operations” further, into the realm of “chance music.” Also known as aleatory music, this method of composition introduces elements of chance or unpredictability regarding the entire composition or its performance. But in Tanaka’s case, we must ask who is the composer of this soundtrack? Who are its performers? In this piece of chance music, all such positions are thrown into flux. The result is a contingent community of interdisciplinary artists and musicians who collaborate in the production of what the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls an inoperative community – that unplanned communal state in which the I’s are always others.

As such, A Piano Played by Five Pianists (First Attempt) not only produces (by chance) a soundtrack for collective engagement – the ostensible task at hand – it also provides an opportunity to envision a different, contingent model of collaboration and, by extension, collectivity.