hayate kobayashi’s solo exhibition, “Polyparole” will be held in June. Based on keywords such as “immigrant” and “queerness,” kobayashi will present works through apparatuses, video, multilingual poetry, and podcasts.
BUG, operated by Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd., will present “Polyparole,” a solo exhibition by hayate kobayashi, opening June 26th (Wed.), 2024. After completing his graduate school at Tokyo University of the Arts, kobayashi received a scholarship from the Ezoe Memorial Recruit Foundation in 2020 and was able to realize his study in Berlin. In the meantime, he has won several awards in Japan and is a promising artist in the future. To encourage kobayashi’s upcoming career, BUG will hold his largest solo exhibition to date, including new works.
The title of this exhibition, “Polyparole,” is a word coined by kobayashi, combining “poly-,” meaning “multiple,” and “parole,” which in linguistics means “an act of speech performed by an individual in a specific situation.”
The pandemic of the COVID-19 infection that occurred at the same time as his study abroad deepened racial divisions and conflicts. kobayashi was temporarily unable to return to his home country and experienced a state of exophony* (German for “state of being outside the mother tongue”) in an unknown land, which led him to think about the “stranger.”
One of the works in the exhibition, “Space-in-translation,” was created in response to a conversation with a poet from China’s Sichuan Province who defected to Berlin. The poet describes his exile as “I ran(我跑了).” kobayashi uses these words as words that resonate with different contexts and attempts to stitch the “strangers” together.
In this exhibition, through the exhibited works and events held during the period, you will hear the murmur of several people, based on the keywords that have interested kobayashi in recent years: “exophony,” “immigrant,” and “queerness.” kobayashi, who was exposed to the murmur of people with diverse backgrounds in Berlin, conveys a simple yet powerful message, “The personal is political,” through works created in a variety of media, including apparatuses, video, multilingual poetry, and podcasts.
*Yoko Tawada, “Exophony: Bogo no soto e deru tabi”, 2012, Iwanami Gendai Bunko
