This exhibition by Suchan Kinoshita included a wide selection of works, ranging from early pieces to new commissions. Characteristically engaging, psychologically dramatic in some respects, it asserted continuity between art and our personal lives.

Translated as ‘the fragment in itself’, the title was taken from one of the key pieces in the exhibition. Based on a snippet of music by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, it involved the ‘preparation’ of a piano, whereby all the keys corresponding to notes that don’t occur in the composition were removed. The superfluous mechanical bits of the instrument were strewn around it on the floor, whilst the sheet music and an empty piano stool invited the viewer to play obviously only one piece. On one hand, the idea conveyed was that a fragment, part of a bigger whole, is sufficient and not to be the point of departure for some desired reconstruction; and on the other, the message was that a fragment is all there is.

Kinoshita subscribes to a kind of existentialism. It is most evident perhaps in her installations of rooms inside the gallery spaces. Usually makeshift, they contained furniture, DIY contraptions, video, interactive devices and other objects that were fragments (in themselves), subject to the imaginative projection of the viewer. These were places where conventional order is at once suggested and undermined. Le Depot des Mots  was an area for models and sketches, objects resting in between times of usefulness and It must have been Thursday afternoon presentsed a suite of interview rooms, where a radio play could be heard through three different spaces.

The Suchan Kinoshita exhibition is kindly suported The Mondriaan Foundation and The Henry Moore Foundation.