teamLab: The World of Irreversible Change
teamLab: The World of Irreversible Change 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 May 10 – August 16, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Pace is pleased to present an exhibition by teamLab at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Which opened on May 10 and will be on view until August 16, the show spotlights a single interactive digital artwork—titled The World of Irreversible Change—projected on a wall in the gallery. This presentation marks teamLab’s first solo exhibition in New York in ten years.
Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko in Tokyo in 2001, teamLab is an international collective of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects. Known for its multisensory, immersive work, teamLab explores the relationships between humans and the world, encouraging new modes of perception through its pioneering, technologically advanced installations. In recent years, teamLab has presented solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Amos Rex in Helsinki; TANK Shanghai; and many other institutions and venues around the world.
The exhibition at Pace in New York, The World of Irreversible Change is projected on a large, freestanding, black-painted wall in a darkened gallery space. First presented by the collective in spring 2022 at the Aomori Museum of Art in Japan, this screen-based work, created by teamLab over five years, has never before been exhibited as a projection. Conceptually, The World of Irreversible Change centers on everyday life in an anonymous city during an unspecified epoch. Animated figures move throughout the panoramic village scene, which will change with the time of day and weather in New York. Scenery and stories will unfold each day, and the lives of the people in the city will continue eternally unless gallery visitors interact with the work, causing permanent disruption.
teamLab: The World of Irreversible Change 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 May 10 – August 16, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Over the course of its exhibition at Pace, The World of Irreversible Change can transform as a result of viewers’ engagement with it. If visitors continue to intervene with the work during its three-month presentation, the scenes of daily life will become increasingly agitated and chaotic, with fighting between individuals escalating into an all-out war. Peace and harmony will give way to fire and destruction, a devolution that speaks to the inherency and universality of violence in the human experience. The city will become forever devoid of people, while plants will begin populating its streets and ruins over time.
“In the ruined city where not a single person remains, the seasons still pass and the sun rises and sets with the time of the real world,” teamLab writes in a statement on The World of Irreversible Change. “After a while, new flora begin to grow in the burnt ruins of the city. The flora grow, bloom, and scatter repeatedly, changing daily with the real passage of time ... Once the world of this artwork begins to burn, the world from before can never be returned to. The people who interact with the artwork cause this outcome.”
Along with its forthcoming presentation of The World of Irreversible Change at Pace’s New York gallery, teamLab will present an interactive installation as part of Art@Harbour 2024 in Hong Kong, running from March 25 to June 2. The collective also recently established teamLab Borderless, a permanent museum of over 70 digital works presented as one continuous world within a multi-room exhibition space, in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development, which is also home to Pace’s new gallery in the Japanese capital, opening this summer. Following Tokyo, teamLab Borderless will open in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Hamburg, Germany, and teamLab is also preparing to open a massive 17,000 square-meter (nearly 183,000 square-feet) experiential art space in Abu Dhabi. Later this year, teamLab’s annual exhibition in the ancient forest of Mifuneyama Rakuen in Kyushu, Japan will take place for the tenth year.
Last year, in December 2023, the collective’s museum teamLab Planets Tokyo was ranked fifth on Google’s “Year in Search,” measured by activity on Google Maps.
teamLab, The World of Irreversible Change, 2024, © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery
teamLab (f. 2001) is an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of various specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians and architects whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world.
teamLab aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world and new perceptions through art. In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perception of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and of the continuity of time. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity of life.
teamLab’s works are in the permanent collection of Amos Rex, Helsinki; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Asia Society Museum, New York; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
This exhibition opened on May 10 and will be on view until August 16, 2024, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
