“The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and KADIST present the exhibition Things Entangling, the culmination of a major, long-term curatorial collaboration.

Trees, fossils, books, artifacts—these are some of our companions as we live in and make sense of a world in which realities and histories collide and reverberate continuously.

This exhibition features artworks by twelve artists/groups that trace and animate the trajectories, nexuses, and mutations of things that resonate with a specific time and place. These things might be material objects or living subjects, but they are always also mediators of meaning, ideology, and memory. When these artists’ practices invoke anthropology, archaeology, or historiography to seek rootedness, they aim less to excavate or clarify the past than to open up a new politics of interpretation for building the present.

Haunted by different time spans and territories, positions and subjectivities, the artists reveal unexpected intersections, elusive networks, and fleeting affinities between things. Through their work they aspire to open up the closed circles, exclusive territories, and static systems that are around and also within us.”