Artizon Museum’s Dumb Type installations will leave you cold

“What’s a mountain? What’s a volcano? Who governs an Empire?”

On the darkish gallery partitions, purple dots flash, turning into denser and extra concentrated till they kind recognizable English phrases — earlier than the laser beams dissipate once more into blurred strains. Within the background of this ticker tape of cryptic meditations, a delicate murmur of discovered sound floats by way of the room. This set up by Dumb Sort, now on view on the Artizon Museum in Chuo Metropolis, Tokyo, appears to hum with vaguely futuristic mechanics. However just like the laser beams aimed on the wall, it solely very sometimes crystallizes into which means earlier than flitting away.

The artwork collective Dumb Sort was based in 1984 and has a shifting membership of collaborators, which most just lately added Ryuichi Sakamoto to its ranks. Collectively, the avant-garde artwork group and musician created a brand new work known as “2022” for final yr’s Venice Biennale. This and two different latest Dumb Sort works have been recreated in Tokyo and tailored for the museum as “2022: remap,” the place will probably be on view from Feb. 25 by way of Might 14. However even for this high-concept collective, a few of the works are particularly laborious to know. And it appears that evidently the displacement of the works is partially accountable.