Kayne Griffin presents a new exhibition You Must Be Free by Mika Tajima, featuring sculptures, paintings, and a large-scale haptic air installation.

From an early investigation into the regulatory and relational structures of human bodies in built environments, Tajima’s recent work extends her inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy. This exhibition focuses on the necessity and impossibility of freedom in our contemporary moment. The title, You Must Be Free, appears as an external command to achieve freedom and produces a contradictory tension that reveals a social limit to its practice. The speech act presents freedom as a pressing desire and controlling demand on the subject, underlining the entwinement of control and freedom. The animating force of this paradoxical directive is manifested in this exhibition as air pressure and its circulation through contained and porous objects and architecture.

Throughout You Must Be Free, air is exchanged, regulated, injected, and ventilated to produce a conditioned space for objects and bodies.