![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/10.-Installation-view-of-Yuko-Mohri-In-Concert-Thu-1-Oct-2026-Sun-24-Jan-2027-c-Thomas-Adank-Barbican-Art-Gallery-1230x1640.jpg\")
The Japanese artist’s symphony of decomposing matter and broken things offers a poetic reflection on the disjointed state of modern life
\n\n\n\nThe Barbican’s Curve gallery is an unwieldy site, one Yuko Mohri’s new exhibition In Concert activates with élan. Entering the crescent space, you’re flanked by two installations constituting Decomposition (all works 2026, though each reiterating ongoing series of the artist’s work). A quartet of globular lamps hang from the ceiling, one set of many dotted variously throughout the space, their lights flickering, or dimming at unpredictable intervals; salvaged from a refuse store in the surrounding residential Barbican and ambiguated, they look fit for a Fritz Lang set. A strand of wiring draws your eye up to the ceiling, and down into the back of a short wooden table displaying an assortment of fruit. Each piece is pierced by clips wired into circuitry beneath the table, which, the exhibition booklet explains, converts their modulating moisture levels into signals for light and sound as if (while nodding to Joseph Beuys’s 1985 Capri Battery) subject to some Frankensteinian experiment in reverse: their bodies producing electricity; the wires drawing life out of them. If they look a little flat, aesthetically lifeless, that’s part of their charm – and entirely the point: being real fruit, their eventual decomposition will alter the composition at large.
\n\n\n\nBut this is a concert, the exhibition title informs us, so we listen to what we look at. Wood-encased hi-fi speakers throughout the space play drawn-out and reversed-woodwind notes, as if bleeding through from the neighbouring Barbican Hall. They hum and wobble in vibrato. Occasionally they swell and grow sticky with crackling noise. That Mohri has previously worked with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto comes as no surprise.
\n\n\n\nMove round the corner, and all sorts of assemblage instruments come into view (Moré Moré [Leaky]). Cymbals clang according to the flow of water pumped around a closed system of tubing dangling midair; a triangle held by a spoon clinks as if to say: dinner is served. A similar notion of object care comes from a line of fans along one stretch of wall (Urban Mining), each blowing onto strands of strung-out wiring, as if to cool them down. There’s bathos to be found everywhere: a bus-red firehose drips feebly into a lampshade bucket, while a tiny suspended bell, pulled by wires, jumps off the ground, ringing mutedly – the world’s worst fire alarm. Further along, water leaks down through the plugholes of stacked bathroom sinks, a rusty alternative to Donald Judd.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/11.-Installation-view-of-Yuko-Mohri-In-Concert-Thu-1-Oct-2026-Sun-24-Jan-2027-c-Thomas-Adank-Barbican-Art-Gallery-1230x1640.jpg\")
The idea of disorder as the dominant tone of contemporary life gets thrown around a lot, not least in the UK, whose political climate in the wake of austerity and Brexit has rattled the country’s previously held notion of itself as a global, unshakeable power; Mohri’s assemblages, an at-times dainty, playful array of humble trash, reiterate disorder as an inevitable function of material life. And there’s poetry in that, too. Listen to water patter onto the inside of the umbrella and watch the shadows of drops run along the floor like tadpoles in a hurry. Small, hot lamps dotted between cabling around the floor cast the wiring and tubing into dramatic shadows on the large white walls, like shadow puppets of plumbing. Of course there’s something ghostly about all this ballet of light, sound and refuse, but in the constancy of action, the gentle cacophony, the assemblages seem to own the space: it’s their show we’re entering (a series of intricate motorisations really run the show, but it doesn’t do to delve into the magician’s trick).
\n\n\n\nUltimately, though, the best reading of In Concert is along the vector of place. Developing the show while in intermittent residency at the Barbican since May, Mohri reconstitutes the decrepitude of this creaking, leaky, soon-to-be-renovated building into a virtue, paying loving attention to broken things. And, to that end, it emerges as the best artistic statement about contemporary London – no, the UK – going: a faulty, disjointed, orchestrated but never really controllable network of things in disrepair, carrying evocations and hauntings of the past, unsure of how to reconstitute it for the future, all alive with strange, beguiling music.
\n\n\n\nYuko Mohri: In Concert at The Barbican Curve, London, 1 October– 24 January
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRead next Yuko Mohri on Representing Japan at the 60th Venice Biennale
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