Toshiya Murakoshi, Silence That Learns to Breathe

Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo presents When Silence Learned to Breathe, the new exhibition by Toshiya Murakoshi. The show gathers photographs that the artist has been shooting since 2011 in his native Fukushima Prefecture. Murakoshi approaches landscape as a site of memory and change, documenting with sensitivity and precision the transformations of territory, atmosphere and the traces left by time. The images on display do not provide a linear narrative nor a stylised depiction. Instead they aim to evoke a sense of suspension and waiting, where silence becomes tangible. Through delicate light, liminal spaces and evocative absences, the photographs call forth a concept of landscape experienced as testimony, as trace of a past and of a possible future. Murakoshi’s approach is not documentary in the traditional sense but poetic: the goal is not to record facts but to evoke a feeling, a residual echo. In this project the transformation of landscape coincides with an interior transformation of the viewer. To look at these photographs means to face the passage of time, the world’s mutability and the weight of memory. The exhibition confirms Murakoshi’s ability to find through photography an essential and meditative language capable of investigating the relationship between space, history and vision.