The Brooklyn-based artist Mika Tajima (b. 1975, Los Angeles) employs sculpture, painting, video, music, and performance, often drawing on contradictions in modernist design and architecture to consider today’s regime of collaborative production. Connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, her work explores how the performing subject (whether a speaker, dancer, designer, factory worker, musician, or filmmaker) is constructed in spaces in which material objects outline action and engagement. She is part of the music-based performance group New Humans.
Tajima earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College (1997) and an MFA from Columbia University (2003), and she attended the Fabric Workshop and Museum Apprentice Training Program (2003). She has had solo exhibitions at Taro Nasu, Tokyo (2015), Art in General, New York (2014), Eleven Rivington, New York (2014), Galeria Quadrado Azul, Lisbon (2013), UT Visual Arts Center, Austin (2011), the Seattle Art Museum (2011), Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2011 and 2007), the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2010), X Initiative, New York (2009), Artissima 2008, Turin, Italy (2008), the Kitchen, New York (2008), Circuit, Lausanne, Switzerland (2007), and the Swiss Institute Art, New York (2005). She has participated in group exhibitions at CCS Bard Galleries and the Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2015), High Line, New York (2014), the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012), Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2012), Calder Foundation Project, New York (2011), New Galerie, Paris (2011), Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York (2010), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008), the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2008), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), MoMA PS1, New York (2006), Asia Society, New York (2006), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2005), and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2005).