Optional Pass

aaploit is pleased to present “Optional Pass,” an exhibition by PIDAN & Minamikawa, from Friday, November 6 to Sunday, November 22, 2026.

Exhibition Statement

Optional Pass is an attempt to bring together, within a digital space, two works that each have their own structure of “choice.”

Minamikawa’s A GAME likens the choices we make in life to a card game. It makes visible how society, environment, and the values we have formed act upon those choices. PIDAN’s Something Else Died There. A Mass of Love. cuts up unwanted photographs and misprints and freely rearranges the fragments. It explores the fluid relationships that choices produce, and the forms that love takes.

Though the two works deal with different subjects and methods, both contain the act of “choosing” within them. In Optional Pass, the elements used in these works, including cut photographs, cards, pointing hands, and picture frames, are digitized and brought onto a single digital canvas.

The two artists share the same screen and take turns working on it. Each tries to reconstruct, in digital space, the relationships that make their own work what it is, but the other is always intervening. Whatever one places, leaves, or moves becomes the condition under which the other makes the next choice. Each decision is made in response to the choices that came before it. As these judgments accumulate, the relationships held by the original works gradually shift, and new relationships begin to emerge between the two works.

What appears there is not a fixed, finished form. Even with the same materials, the same screen, and the same two people, later decisions change depending on the order of choices and on what remains on the screen at that moment. Each work retains its own logic while mixing with the other, and each time a temporary state is formed.

Here, a work that was once complete also becomes material for the next choice and the next work. The rules and relationships that made up a work are carried forward, which makes further practice possible. Different states keep arising even from the same conditions.

Through this repetition, the way choice itself appears also changes. As things sit side by side, overlap, and are placed in other contexts, acts and relationships that had not been recognized as choices begin to appear as choices. As different choices and relationships keep arising from the same conditions, the previously unseen contours of choice gradually come into view.

PIDAN & Minamikawa

Artist Talk: PIDAN & Minamikawa × Kita Keiju (researcher of contemporary photography) Saturday, November 7, 2026, from around 18:00. No reservation required, free admission.

For inquiries about the exhibition and the works, please email info@aaploit.com.