July 31, 2025

Fakewhale in dialogue with Yuki Okumura: On the Subjectivity of Exhibition Space

In his solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna (March 8 – May 18, 2025), Yuki Okumura transforms the supposedly neutral white cube into a living organism endowed with memory, voice, and identity. Through three site-specific projects, Wilhelm as Hauptraum, Secession’s Hive Mind(s), and Big White Empty Playground, the Japanese artist questions the mythology of spatial neutrality, intertwining personal biographies, institutional dynamics, and physical interventions within the gallery itself. We at FakeWhale had the pleasure of delving into the conceptual layers and working processes behind this multifaceted exploration of exhibition space as a relational entity.

Fakewhale: The white cube is often perceived as a neutral, pure space, a sterile container for art. Yet, in your exhibition at the Secession, you approached the Hauptraum as a sentient being, with its own memory, voice, and identity. What initially led you to challenge this presumed neutrality and instead reveal the space’s subjectivity?

Yuki Okumura: Any room we inhabit has its own conditions and contexts, shaped and reshaped by people’s actions and reactions to it. This is quite similar to how one’s personality and biography are formed and reformed through interactions with other people, based on the given bodily structure and life environment. In this sense, every room naturally has its own life, it is living because it is lived, and a white cube, as long as it is an architectural space, is no exception Indeed, when objects are hung on the wall or placed on the floor, the white cube stages its supposed neutrality or pureness as a theatrical backdrop for them. But when nothing is there, it is a different story: the white cube’s essential dynamism, organicity, and vitality as a lived room are then laid bare, which in most cases is much more interesting than when it is filled with so-called artworks. Again, this is similar to us. When governed by the brain, you impersonate yourself, repressing your true nature as a holistic being. But when the head goes blank, the lived body begins to act on its own, revealing how it autonomously works beyond your rational control or cerebral preconceptions. In other words, when the room or the head is empty, the space or the person’s real nature is uncovered. This is my hypothesis.

Even so, simply presenting an empty white cube would be the most boring artistic action. If I have an exhibition under my name, I want the room and my body to directly interact in the here and now, so that the space’s personality and biography and my body’s conditions and contexts are not only revealed but also renewed by each other’s actions and reactions, a double-sided effect that I find quite important in my view of art-making.

But, while it is technically easy to empty a space, how could you keep your head blank, or in other words, keep yourself lost, while working in the space? The most fun, effective, and instantaneous way, I believe, is to employ the basic procedure of making a work of conceptual art, according to my own analysis of the works and words of Sol LeWitt, who coined the term, and other relevant artists, and adapt it not just in a site-specific, but rather in a site-parasitic, manner.

The conceptual procedure takes the following steps: 1) you intuitively conceive an idea, not a theoretical or rational thought, but a course of simple action, that requires no skill or talent to carry out; 2) turn it into a set of instructions by giving it a few rules that govern the process only, not the result, so it is open to chance like a game; 3) perform the action by following the score blindly, as if you were a machine; and 4) accept and share its direct output as-is. Many people think that when working conceptually, you need to think a lot, but that is the epigonal, capitalised version, Conceptual Art, theorised by Joseph Kosuth. Authentically, LeWitt suggests it is a method to work intuitively and irrationally, without thinking much, or in other words, without making most decisions by yourself, from beginning to end: not your brainy head, but various external, chance-driven factors that you cannot control, including the basic, most natural workings of your body and mind, determine every detail of the work.

When invited to have an exhibition, then, how can you trigger the above-mentioned double effect? My strategy, therefore, is to perform a conceptual procedure strictly on site, to conduct every step within the ecological sphere of the empty space, ,while using found elements only. This way of working makes your position analogous to a parasite: you step into the host space with your hands empty, without bringing any alien materials from anywhere except your own body, and generate new objects and situations just by reconfiguring already existing elements, mediated by your own body and life.

However, as a space for me to work this way, the Hauptraum of the Secession felt too vast and loaded. It is considered to be the first white cube in history, and for more than 125 years, it has constantly updated itself through countless artistic interventions and a number of architectural renovations. Traces of actions by so many people, including architects, artists, board members, cleaners, curators, guards, educators, installers, and visitors, have accumulated and remain as tangible memories, whether visible or not. And yet, it is still full of dormant potentials for future actions: ideas are in the air, waiting to be conceived and performed by human individuals.

In need of diverse personalities and biographies, not just mine, I therefore asked for help, inviting various people who have close relations to the space, who had shaped, were shaping, and would shape the Hauptraum. I positioned myself between the space and each person, and in an attempt to stimulate direct interactions between them, designed three site-parasitic conceptual procedures.

In Wilhelm as Hauptraum, you invited Willi Montibeller, former chief technician at the Secession, to personify the Hauptraum itself, narrating its history from a first-person perspective. What was the original intuition behind this performative gesture, and how do you see personal memory shaping the “biography” of an exhibition space?

Wilhelm ‘Willi’ Montibeller worked for the Secession for more than 20 years, leading the team of installers who set up numerous exhibitions in the Hauptraum as well as in the two other spaces in the house.

In summer 2024, I visited him on the outskirts of Vienna, together with artist Luciana Janaqui as a camera person. We took a handy-cam borrowed from the Secession, along with a wooden model of the Hauptraum made by the current chief installers Hans Weinberger and Miriam Bachmann. In his kitchen, where we put the model on a table, I interviewed Willi about his fond memories of some of the exhibitions he had installed in the Hauptraum.

Indeed, I wanted him to personify the Hauptraum, but not in a theatrical, scripted manner, which always bores me due to its prioritization of intended presentation over open process, and control over chance. I did not want him to imagine what the space feels or remembers, either, because I know how poor our imagination about other perspectives is. Instead of making him act as the space or make up any stories, I asked him to share his own recollections as-is, indeed with one special rule, though: he would try to use the first-person singular pronoun (I, me, my, mine) to refer not only to himself but also to the space. Accordingly, he would also take the second-person singular pronoun (you, your, yours) coming out of my mouth as referring to either him or the space. So, it was more like a linguistic game for us to play together.

But why Willi? I wanted a single person, not multiple people, to embody the Hauptraum, as I am always interested in one-to-one confrontation between self and world. And Willi seemed ideal. His memory over two decades would overlap with the Hauptraum’s to the greatest degree; in the space, he was not just seeing the exhibitions but also building them up, together with the artists. Emine Koza, who has been cleaning the space for almost 40 years, could also have been great, but she has not installed works. Plus, given that Hauptraum is a masculine word in German, I had no choice but to give it a male voice.

After casting Willi as the protagonist, what remained was a purely fun part: I was just so curious how his personal memories and subjective experiences would narrate the biography of the Hauptraum.

There was, however, one clearly theatrical aspect involved. In my exhibition at the Hauptraum, the resulting video was presented as an audio-visual installation unfolding throughout the entire space, with its audio, Willi’s voice, reverberating everywhere, from four special loudspeakers installed at the far corners while the imagery of the video was only visible once you reached the rear part of the space and turned back to the flat screen placed behind a standing wall. With this setting, I intended a certain effect: making the visitor feel as if the space itself were talking to them. It worked very well. But looking back, was it worth breaking the rule of only using found items, by renting the special sound equipment from outside, even though it was the sole exception? Well, I have no regrets anyway, this deviation was driven by my pure curiosity about how it would turn out, and I really wanted to experience it firsthand.

During the interview with Willi, you focused not only on his words but also on his hand gestures as he reconstructed past exhibitions, tracing them into the air. How do you view these bodily movements as a form of spatial translation or as a non-verbal archive?

I’ve always been fascinated by how language, both verbal and non-verbal, shapes our reality through its faculty to summon events, objects, and situations that are not present in the here and now, including those in one’s memory. Spoken words and bodily gestures join forces, but to communicate the concrete form of something absent or inaccessible, the hands are more eloquent than the voice: they can directly picture what is otherwise only visible to your mind’s eye. Interested in how Willi, a person who is more somatic than linguistic, in my view, would choreograph himself, I asked Janaqui to chase his hands.

Above all, Willi’s memory of the Hauptraum exhibitions is not just stored in his head, but also inscribed in his hands, much more directly and deeply. Because again, he was not a mere spectator but a hand-worker, constructing display furniture, building walls, and hanging, installing, and sometimes even executing works. So, using his hands to draw the forms of absent artworks and trace past actions could be regarded as an act not just of re-performing but of recollecting, in its own right, the embodied memory of his manual labour.

In Secession’s Hive Mind(s), you explored the collective decision-making processes within the institution by translating a board meeting into a fragmented yet unified monologue. What interested you in transforming a group discussion into a kind of singular hive mind?

The Hauptraum’s contexts and conditions are determined not only by the installers, but also by many others who work behind the scenes, including the board of the Secession, who set out all the exhibitions by selecting which artists to invite.

Exploring the relations between the Hauptraum and its human agents, I naturally became interested in how the members of the current board, consisting of artists and architects, as it has always been, since the Secession is the world’s oldest artist-run space, regulate this space, and in particular, how their plural voices, active during their democratic decision-making process, transform into a single voice, mediated by the press office, when the decision is publicly announced.

To play with this shift, I first asked the board to discuss a potential new name for the space currently called Hauptraum, which literally means ‘main room’,seen as problematic by some people as it connotes an unwanted hierarchy between this original space and the two other smaller, subsequently added spaces in the house. Upon my request, a Zoom meeting was organised, in which most of the board members, of course without my attendance, took part, and even voted for the best new name in the end. Their German conversation was recorded and then entirely transcribed. I then asked Secession’s press person, Ramona ‘Mona’ Heinlein, to verbally translate it into English, as if re-performing her job.

You asked Ramona Heinlein to follow a very particular translation rule: replacing every “we” and “you” with “I”. This linguistic shift touches on questions of identity and positions the translator as a co-author. How does the concept of “translation” function within your artistic practice?

I wanted Mona’s monologue to render a collective discussion as a lone argument inside her head, as if she had multiple personalities. I set up this rule so that each different personality would be clearly rendered as one’s own. Also, it is always important to equip a conceptual procedure with a handicap, as I call it, which makes it more fun as a game, like handball in football, so that the player absorbs oneself more deeply in it and more accidents are invited.

What has fascinated and puzzled me since childhood is how each of us seems chained to a particular, single body. In other words, it appears that our individuality is demarcated by physical separation, but why not by other criteria? Translation has been a means for me to play with and go beyond this, mainly through its deviation from the proper use of personal pronouns, just like spiritual mediumship, where the medium’s first-person singular pronoun refers to someone else. In my practice, initially, I devised translation to turn someone into someone else, to exchange the identities between two different bodies. I then began to experiment with other variations: one mind sharing multiple bodies, one body sharing multiple minds, a person embodying a non-human entity, and so on. Obviously, both Secession’s Hive Mind(s) and Wilhelm as Hauptraum can be seen in this light.

Precisely speaking, though, translation can reconfigure individuality only in the realm of people’s subjective perceptions, and only for a limited moment. Certain frameworks such as video can prolong the effect, but anyway, it does not work in actual terms. Indeed, in translating someone’s speech or text, you do not express yourself, rather, you kill who you are, and devote yourself to the linguistic conversion, working as mechanically as possible. However, you cannot become a neutral vessel. Rather, the harder you depersonalise yourself, the more the truly unique, thus essentially unconcealable, nature of your lived body is manifested in subtle details. In short, I believe that through Mona’s translation of the board meeting or Willi’s translation of his own memory, not only we encounter, but they themselves also re-encounter, with great surprise, what kind of persons they are.

The visual juxtaposition of the monologue with footage of the Secession’s rooftop beehives introduces a living metaphor of the institution as an organic, almost entomological, system. Where did this analogy between human collectivity and bee colonies originate?

I was simply guided by the sci-fi term ‘hive mind’, which refers to a collective consciousness, assuming that an entire beehive shares a single mind, and by the coincidence that on the rooftop of the Secession building there are several beehives taken care of by Hans Weinberger, a literal proof that an art institution is organic.

In general, when designing the procedure of a work, I avoid making arbitrary or rational decisions as much as possible, because what I want is a surprise, and my poor brainy head never gives it to me. That is why I employ the conceptual methodology, letting external factors form an event through chance and coincidence. Linguistic association often plays a role here.

In the work in question, this approach is applied not only to juxtaposing the monologue and the bees, but also to casting Mona: I asked her to be the interpreter solely because of her role as the press person, a position that translates plurality to singularity, even before I knew her voice and way of speech. I was simply curious how it would go, and I would enjoy and accept any consequence. It’s not a question of quality, but of encounter. This attitude is also based on my joy in learning how unique and different each and every person is, including myself, especially when it is crystalised in the form of artworks.

In Big White Empty Playground, you invited Secession staff, cleaners, educators, security guards, and installers, to develop and perform actions based on simple, chance-driven rules. What emerged from this horizontal creative process, in which typically invisible roles were empowered as creative agents?

Through this project, I wanted to focus on the material, infrastructural, and workplace conditions of the Hauptraum, rather than its historical or social contexts, which the two films explore. So, I only sought the participation of those who regularly engage in physical labour in the space, not inviting administrative, curatorial, and shopkeeping staff.

I conducted a workshop in the empty Hauptraum, for the interested members of the invited staff, about how to conceive and perform a conceptual action in a site-parasitic manner. Except for the introductory online lecture, it took place during the week prior to the opening of my exhibition. Through three assignments on diaristic, choreographic, and interventional actions, respectively, each participant was encouraged to come up with an idea inspired by what had attracted them when at work in the Hauptraum, carry out the action to directly approach them, by using materials, objects, and tools found in or around the space, including the basement workshop and their own pockets and bags, and leave the direct outcome where they were generated. I also contributed a spontaneous piece. All the resulting objects and situations remained and formed a group exhibition inside my solo exhibition, which I called Big White Playground.

The actions conceived and performed by the participants include the following. The cleaner Emine Koza pressed her nose to the glass pane of the rear exit of the space, once per day and for a month, leaving unique prints of her natural nose grease with somewhat regular intervals, inspired by her daily erasure, for nearly four decades, of the nose prints of curious visitors who look out. The installer Márton Zalka poured found yellow paint along the edges of each square of the ceiling grid, letting gravity transfer the shapes onto the floor, in response to his fear of heights when changing neon lights up there as part of his job. The educator Grzegorz Kielawski did an ongoing work throughout the show’s run, stacking Austrian 50-cent coins, which feature the Secession building’s iconic ‘golden cabbage’ on the tails, according to how much he earned while staying in the Hauptraum during each of his guided tour covering the entire house, based on his hourly fee. The guard Mario Batram, each time he shifted his position to or from the Hauptraum, rolled a cigarette with various materials, including Secession-related prints, and smoked it where he usually does, outside, right behind the space, simultaneously whistling a song he likes.

Not just these, but many of the works gave me great surprises. Here, usually overlooked or hidden characteristics of the Hauptraum afford simple actions, activating long-dormant potentials and revealing new aspects of the space, updating our perception of it. At the same time, through diverse reactions from the space, visible in material textures and object arrangements as direct consequences of the actions, the unique sensibility and corporeality of each participant are given form, introducing to us, and also rewriting their own perception of, who they are.

I am not sure if it was a truly ‘horizontal’ process, because there was me serving as an overarching umbrella. Indeed, I admired each participant’s agency, negotiated an artist’s fee however small it ended up, and framed the entire constellation as a group exhibition in its own right, with its own online page. However, there was certainly this aspect where I was using them for my project. Just like how found materials, objects, and tools served as chance elements bringing unpredictability to the participants’ working processes, the participants themselves were found people for my projects, so to speak, who were there beyond my choice and acted far beyond my control, creating amazing surprises.

Aware of this nested structure, and trying to take on full responsibility, I decided to call the exhibition Yuki Okumura, rather than Hauptraum, which might have made more sense in terms of my artistic perspective: it felt much more like a solo exhibition by the space, than by me, where all the participants lent their lived body as unique tools for the space to use for its own self-expression.

Across all three projects, your work seems to propose a kind of “humanized institutional critique,” where the institution is reimagined as a field of biographical relationships. How does this approach diverge from the more ideological institutional critique of the 1970s–1990s?

To me, criticising something means detecting and revealing previously unknown aspects or potentials of the target entity, rather than pointing out its faults or defects. It is an act of devoting oneself not only to discovering and observing what elements constitute it, but also to reinterpreting them in new ways, to opening up new horizons. So, while my projects were not aimed at attacking or demanding radical changes in the system of the Secession, I do consider them ‘critical’ of the institution, in terms of how the conditions and contexts of its ‘main room’ have been, can be, and will be shaped by human individuals. Perhaps we can return to the first question: if a white cube feels neutral and pure, it is thanks to human efforts that maintain those qualities, and in that sense, a white cube is non-neutral and impure in the first place, open to various interrelations with subjectivities.

In several previous projects, from your work on Lucy Lippard’s 557,087 to your reinterpretations of conceptual instructions, you often assign the realization of the artwork to preexisting rules and to others’ execution. Where do you locate the boundary between the artist as author and as facilitator of processes?

The 1969 Seattle group show 557,087, curated by Lucy R. Lippard, is an important exhibition because for the first time in art history, not the artists themselves but those at the museum, especially Lippard herself, executed most of the works based on the instructions sent by the artists. For my 2021–2022 work 7,502,733, I re-performed the execution procedures of 30 of the works realised or planned for this exhibition, and with the resulting 30 objects as components, formed a large-scale installation.

From the original exhibition, I only selected works that could be made easily, manually, and single-handedly. Because my aim was not to reconstruct the original works but to encounter new results, generated through the same procedures yet mediated solely by my own body and life. The entire installation for me was a self-portrait in this sense. You may think that a set of instructions is a device to recreate the same work beyond time and space, whoever executes it. But in fact, the result you get can never be identical to the original form, and the difference between them points to the uniqueness of each executant. So, instruction and translation work quite similarly from my perspective. Perhaps, working in the conceptual manner is equal to translating the world, so to speak.

And yes, like the two films for the Secession, I often give instructions to people who take part in my projects. One example is my 2019 film The Man Who, which explores my fantasy that On Kawara and stanley brouwn might have been one and the same person. It’s not so otherworldly: Their practices had numerous commonalities, they both used their own bodies to measure space and time, and yet, for decades until their passing, they never presented themselves to the public physically, verbally, or visually. I interviewed nine people, each of whom had personal exchanges with both Kawara and brouwn. While sharing their memories, however, each interviewee was not allowed to pronounce the names of the two artists, referring to both of them simply as ‘him’. With their random stories rearranged chronologically in terms of when the actual events took place, the resulting feature-length video automatically narrates the life of a mysterious man who seemed to have a double life between Amsterdam and New York.

Indeed, I did not author any of the original instructions of the Seattle works nor did I narrate any of the Kawara or brouwn-related memories. But I designed the entire structure, my position resembling that of the director of a film or a dance company. Many of my projects consist of a number of onion like layers, with the authorship attributed to a different party on each level, just like how each work in Big White Playground belongs to the person who made it, of course not to me. The layer I am in charge of is always the most external one, wrapping around the other layers inside. But it does not mean I am superior; it’s just that geographically, that is my position.

Looking beyond your exhibition in Vienna, in what direction is your current research evolving? Are there new projects where you plan to further explore the intersections of space, the body, and collective biography?

I actually find huge potential in Big White Empty Playground. Its entire programme, from conducting a workshop for employees of an art institution about site-parasitic self-instructed conceptual actions to organising a group exhibition with their resulting works, was developed for this particular occasion, but it holds a certain versatility, adaptable and implementable in art institutions around the world. I hope to organise more iterations in different places; I would love to see what kind of actions will be conceived and performed by different individuals, and how they collectively portray and narrate the personality and biography of the space itself.

Also, from my experience of teaching classes and conducting workshops at art academies in Europe and Japan, I have a strong interest in exploring the conceptual self-instruction method in the context of today’s higher art education, where some students seem to be lost in their artistic direction, stuck with the fixed style of their work, blocked by their own overthinking brain, and/or troubled by the still-persisting belief that the artist must be a genius or the artwork needs a concept. The method, as a technique for how to keep yourself lost in the working process, has the potential to rehabilitate them, so to speak, allowing them to regain the initial fun, surprise, and self-discovery from art-making. I am planning to publish a (self-)teacher’s handbook to propose an interdisciplinary curriculum, with a focus on this potential.

Many artists have tried to blur the boundary between art and life by bringing everyday situations into the exhibition space. But most such attempts disappoint me in that they seem only to exploit the ideological fiction of the white cube. Indeed, a white cube is staged so that the outside world does not come in, as Brian O’Doherty said, but artists began to use it the other way around: once placed inside a white cube, anything becomes unworldly, extraordinary, and thus artistic. I am against this theatre. Because in the first place, art, which in my own glossary equals the simultaneous revelation and renewal of the artist’s self and the world, takes place nowhere but in life, rarely in institutions. So, I am rather interested in exploring the exhibition space just as another room we inhabit, an open part of the world, a site of life, thus a real place for art, even if this can lead to the eventual disappearance of many of the things we currently call ‘art’.