Must-See: Kazuna Taguchi Looks Back

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition

Of the many eyes – fragmented, disembodied, floating in space – that appear in Kazuna Taguchi’s solo exhibition ‘I’ll Never Ask You’ at MUMOK, Vienna, few gaze straight at me. Some blankly stare out of the picture’s frame; others seem to be longing for somewhere far away, untouched by the visitors’ presence. This dreamlike web of glances develops quietly throughout the exhibition’s five rooms, enhancing the already otherworldly atmosphere that characterizes the artist’s small-format, black and white photographs. 

Taguchi brings together two of her most recent series of works. ‘The Eyes of Eurydice’ (2019–22) draws inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and his journey to the underworld to retrieve his deceased wife, Eurydice. The artist rethinks the original narrative by shifting the focus to Eurydice, thereby challenging her position as a passive object of the male gaze. Taguchi’s photographs capture torn, crumbled and painted-over cut-outs of eyes and faces – reminiscent of the surrealist art of Claude Cahun or Maya Deren, and guided by a similarly oblique logic of memory and dream. As she adopts Eurydice’s ghostly perspective, the artist shrouds her images in a phantasmal atmosphere, one that enhances the fragmentation and fleetingness of reality. 

Taguchi’s meditation on the hazy quality of vision and images continues in her series ‘In Anticipation’ (2025). The work presents photographs of Lucio Fontana’s ‘Concetto spaziale’ (Spatial Concept, 1947–68) series, in which the Italian artist’s physical tearing of the canvas challenged the illusionistic nature of the representational plane. Taguchi’s two-dimensional photographs, however, make these cuts appear flattened, as if mended. The camera that captured the photographs is also visible in some of the images, reflected in the protective glass covering the canvas. This ghostly appearance highlights the pictures’ manufactured nature, while the camera’s mechanical eye stares quietly at the viewer through the cut’s void – the incursion of the camera recalling Eurydice’s silent gaze. 

Fontana searched for an absolute essence hiding behind the flat surface of things. On the contrary, Taguchi’s vision – milky and opaque – dwells in a penumbra-like suspension of space and time. She plums the threshold between darkness and light – neither black nor white, but infinite in its shades of grey.

Kazuna Taguchi’s ‘I’ll Never Ask You’ is on view at Mumok, Vienna, until 16 November

^{Main image: Kazuna Taguchi, The Eyes of Eurydice #32 (detail), 2022, gelatin Silver Print, 17 × 12 cm. Courtesy: the artist}