Nadja Solari

"nibble, nibble, gnaw" is a bilingual (Japanese/English) artist book / catalogue for an exhibition of the Swiss artist Nadja Solari at The Container gallery in Tokyo. The exhibition, to celebrate the centenary of the Dada movement, in partnership with the Switzerland embassy in Japan, is a spatial mixed-media installation, constructing a connection between the contemporary digital-age bot-generated spam emails and Sound Poetry. Inspired by the subject lines of such emails, which are often a comical neologism that tries to outsmart the spam filtering programmes to avoid interception, is akin to Sound Poetry, and used as the backbone of this exhibition. During this process these subject lines and emails defunct semantic meaning and create a new language, random and chaotic, reminiscent of the Dadaists' writings - the generated poetry of our current digital and virtual realities. The result is similar to early 20th century poetry that many Dadaists generated through manual techniques, such as Automatism and chance, currently, replaced by digitally automated systems. The exhibition at The Container is a loose conglomerate of everyday objects, each with a different kind of circuit/stream/flow, or a repeated mechanism, to raise issues relating to the boundaries between the private and public. The objects are adorned with over-sized heart-shaped gingerbread biscuits, bearing bot-generated spam messages lifted from actual spam emails. The iconography is deeply influenced by advertising, consumerism, slogans, and catchphrases we habitually encounter in our everyday lives, with a dose of associations taken from fairytales' symbolism and allegory. This publication is a mood map of associative imagery and keywords the artist generated whilst developing this exhibition, and it showcases the conceptual development process of the exhibition. The publication also sees an especially commissioned short story, a contemporary fairytale, written by the young author Shawn Mehrens, The Buried Princess, inspired by keywords and imagery contributed by Solari. The story is also accompanied by an Instagram account with the username theburiedprincess, with images from this publication and posts from "Helen," the main character of the story, facilitated by Nadja Solari. Follow theburiedprincess on the app, or search for the hash tag bearing the same name. The Container is a contemporary exhibition space in Nakameguro, Tokyo. The space opened in March 2011 to create a site that encourages people to engage with art installations and works, where the emphasis is on curation and the accessibility of contemporary art and ideas to the general public. As the name suggests, the physical space is no more than a constructed shipping container (485x180x177cm), made to measurements of old Japanese shipping containers, housed inside Bross hair salon, in one of Tokyo's most loved and trendy neighbourhoods. The Container invites Japanese and international artists to make site-specific installations four times a year. Each installation remains on view to the public for two-and-a-half months. Since 2013, The Container also started to publish full-colour, bilingual (Jap/Eng) exhibition catalogues, available on Amazon US, Canada, and Europe, as well as a variety of online publishers and academic and public libraries across the US. This is our tenth publication. The space receives extensive international coverage, including ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Glass Magazine, Art & Antiques Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Blouin Artinfo, Art-iT, Bijutsu-Techo/BT, NHK, Tokyo Art Beat, The Japan Times, and The Sunday Times, travel guides and in-flight magazines, to mention only a few. www.the-container.com