Kazuna Taguchi: I’ll never ask you mumok, Vienna

Roland Barthes opens Chapter 34 of his Camera Lucida with the words: “It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, the Albertian perspective, and the optic of the camera obscura).” Yet he continues, in disagreement, by saying, “no, it was the chemists.” A few lines later, he notes: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.”¹ Vienna-based Japanese artist Kazuna Taguchi works in and with this multifaceted space between painting and photography, questioning references of our current visual worlds, which destabilize a Barthesian “That-has-been” (ibid.), and investigating scopic regimes. She creates a precise, and at times surrealistic, black and- white cosmos of images that defies clear articulation; yet, her work often derives from and can be tied back into art history and the related discourses. As an image collector, and through a refined process, she brings together different media-(re)produced images and translates them into paintings, which she then reworks, orchestrates, and photographs in changing scenarios.

Heike Eipeldauer curated this noteworthy exhibition, which is situated on the third basement level of mumok in Vienna, in five consecutive spaces connected by a long corridor that allows visitors to see through the gallery from one end to the other. Upon entering the space, one encounters to the right Kazuna Taguchi’s most extensive body of work, The Eyes of Eurydice (2019–22), and to the left her most recent group of works, In Anticipation (2025). The latter is based on the artist’s examination of Lucio Fontana’s canonical Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept, 1947–68). Four small-format gelatin silver prints with subtle variations of Fontana’s cut image, presented behind glass, are precisely aligned in the space. If the Italian artist attempted to expand the pictorial space by adding the dimensions of time and space through his gestures, Kazuna Taguchi examines additional layers by negotiating the space between painting and photography. She leaves the mediatic referent and the space between the two in limbo by showing the inscribed reflections on the glass of a tripod and on the gallery floor in her precise reproduction of Fontana’s work, which in her process of reworking must once have been a photograph. Such uncertainty about the question of the referent— or, more precisely, about the circulation of the image of the referent—reverberates in present- day image perception.

The myth around The Eyes of Eurydice unfolds questions of seeing along the lines of longing, the living, and the dead: Orpheus attempts to bring his beloved wife back from the realm of the dead with his song of mourning, which indeed so deeply moves the gods that they allow her to return. Yet, this is only permitted under the condition that Orpheus does not glimpse his beloved on the way up—which he could not resist, losing Eurydice forever. Kazuna Taguchi’s body of work emphasizes not Orpheus’s gaze and its impatient longing, but The Eyes of Eurydice. The eyes unfold a way of seeing that is not tangible since it happens within the realm of death. In her work, glances allow image repetitions of textiles, female faces, body fragments, or gestures to circulate: a slender hand opens a coat and holds a fragment of a picture showing a left eye, the eyebrow, and the hairline with a circular overpainting. The torn fragment of the painting acts as a reminder of the part that is no longer there, pondering questions of presence and absence, which are inherent to photography.

On the adjacent wall, a photograph shows the same painted fragment stuck onto the coat, but now the coat is taken off, likely hanging on a garment rack. These seemingly hovering eyes in the exhibition space suggest various perspectives emerging from different sides: the referents, the photographer, the painter, the beholder, the image itself, and maybe many more. Kazuna Taguchi condenses the political dimensions of gazes more explicitly in another photograph, taken at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It depicts the copying of an old master painting by Diego Velázquez, Infanta Margarita in a Blue Dress (1659), by a female painter, who together with Taguchi destabilizes century-old power relations and deconstructs the once male gaze. An emphasis on female agents and repetition is also evident in the next gallery, culminating in a triptych accompanied by a photograph of a loose swathe of textile depicting two eyes directed at the beholder. The mythical scene of Orpheus’s forbidden gaze leads to Eurydice’s final disappearance, and it is here that Kazuna Taguchi’s work ties in: the photograph takes the place of its referent.