ART CITIES:N.York-Mika Tajima

At the heart of Mika Tajima’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans performance, sculpture, painting, and new media installation is a profound inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy in built and virtual spaces. Tracing modernist architecture and design from the Industrial Revolution to the sharing economy, Tajima draws on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of a social space—by which living things make their appearance to probe the visibility of performance, control, and freedom—to investigate how different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as sensorial and psychic experiences.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Mika Tajima in her solo exhibition “37 Dimensions” situates her latest series, titled “24 Hour Cosmos”, among other recent bodies of work.  Known for her artistic investigations into human regulatory and relational structures—both internal and external—Tajima’s multifaceted practice incorporates technology and data as well as traditional techniques to probe the aesthetic and perceptual complexities of contemporary life. From her early installation and performance work to more recent explorations in painting and sculpture, Tajima has developed series over the past several years that stimulate sensorial and psychic responses while activating theoretical approaches. Her work is guided by her enduring engagement with issues of agency and control.

The exhibition’s title, “37 Dimensions”, refers to a recent development in quantum physics in which scientists demonstrated that a pulse of light can exist across 37 dimensions—far beyond the three-dimensional world through which we ordinarily perceive and make assumptions about reality. The same research has also shown that the state of a photon may be influenced non-locally across vast distances. Mirroring the enigmas of quantum states, the constellation of works in the exhibition explores the depths of human cognition, perception, and latent potential.

Anchoring “37 Dimension”s, Tajima’s new series “24 Hour Cosmos” extends the ethos of her 2024 sculpture “Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States)”, a portrait of national sentiment across a single day created by analyzing social media data and compressing it within a 5d memory crystal. Amassing text-based datasets of news events from around the world, each “24 Hour Cosmos” work aggregates data from one day and translates it into material abstraction, encoding it into the surface of the work to create a portrait of the day in shimmering luminescence, like a measurement of changing light from a camera’s long exposure. The word “cosmos” refers to the universe or a complex, orderly system, and these works are also subtitled for the days they reference. These ethereal wall-mounted pieces have varying holographic surfaces, measuring interconnected global events and moods as prismatic color and shifting visibility and luminosity that respond to the viewer’s positioning.

Like much of Tajima’s work, “24 Hour Cosmos” is process-oriented, and in this case it employs photonics, optoelectronics, machine learning, and customized data analysis systems. In collaboration with technicians and engineers, the artist developed a machine that laser etches diffracted data points onto photopolymer film, taking up to 200 hours for each piece. Custom code employing analytics collects and transforms the entangled footprint of international news cycles into distinct clusters and points of light and color. In an age defined by big data and high-velocity digital life, the works reflect the dissonance between individual experience and the universal while also evoking the ephemeral, dynamic nature of humanity beyond data and the multiplicity of perspectives embedded in interwoven global events.

In their own way, these works speak to the radical experimentations of the California Light and Space artists—who have long been an important part of Pace’s history and program—while taking them further into the realm of networked information, sociality, and the self.

The exhibition positions the “24 Hour Cosmos” works in dialogue with pieces from Tajima’s recent series “Negentropica”, which she debuted in 2025. With their carved and forcefully pierced black marble vases and nested flower arrangements—whose decay has been chemically slowed and also infused with fluorescence—the UV-lit “Negentropica” works become bio-hacked spectral augmentations, emitting a glow of life force otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Another counterpoint to the data-driven “24 Hour Cosmos”, both series reflect on vastly different time scales—human, geological, cosmic, and technological.

In the south gallery, adjacent to the main exhibition space, the show continues with works from Tajima’s ongoing “Art d’Ameublement” and |Negative Entropy” series, bodies of work concerned with capturing and expanding upon sensorial input through singular processes of creation.

Photo: Mika Tajima, 24 Hour Cosmos (Prototype), 2026, © Mika Tajima, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 27/6-15/8/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/