LIZZIE FITCH | RYAN TRECARTIN: IT WAIVES BACK

Prada presents the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch | Ryan Trecartin: It Waives Back”, organized with the support of Fondazione Prada, at Prada Aoyama Tokyo. The sixth floor of the building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, will host the first presentation of this work by American collaborative artists Fitch | Trecartin in Asia, and their first solo show in Japan.

PRADA AOYAMA
24 October 2024 - 13 January 2025
5-2-6 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Monday to Sunday: 11am - 8pm

The exhibition presents new movies and sculptures conceived by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin as part of a broader body of work that began in 2016, when the artists moved their home and studio to rural Ohio. The foundational body of work, titled “Whether Line”, was commissioned by Fondazione Prada and debuted in 2019 as a large-scale multimedia installation in Milan. As explained by the artists, “Our project in Ohio is intended to be a ‘life project,’ providing space for experimentation and collaboration. Our goal is to allow the purpose of the space to evolve and grow.”

For “It Waives Back”, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin present a large-scale installation, two movies, and a series of freestanding sculptures. The sculptural theatre, a signature installation motif of the artists, takes the form of a hybrid environment consisting of a wooden structure and a darkened greenhouse.
In undertaking this new body of work for their Tokyo exhibition, the artists have revisited the hundreds of hours of footage shot during the making of “Whether Line”. This working process of re-engaging with their own work, which they have done in previous projects, expands on their concept of "version-hood" – where many truths can coexist at the same time. In “Whether Line”, characters, narrative elements, and time itself are location-based. These core ideas are further explored in “It Waives Back”, where characters simultaneously occupy multiple states of being – figuratively and physically. The works featured utilize gaming environments conceptually, narratively, and aesthetically to explore the generative potential, and limitations, of game-like social frameworks and systems.

Lizzie Fitch (born in 1981 in Bloomington, Indiana) and Ryan Trecartin (born in 1981 in Webster, Texas) live and work in Athens, Ohio. They have worked together since meeting at Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. Their collaborative work has been included in exhibitions at major institutions around the world, including: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2006); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, USA (2011); the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2011–12); the Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2014–15), Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2018) and Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2019).

Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin are acclaimed for a collaborative practice that fuses non-linear videos with immersive installations. Rhizome-like narratives and an imploding dramaturgical logic characterize their video work. Protagonists embody fluid gender roles and forms of fragmented subjectivity in a buoyant clash of reality TV and social-media identity tropes.