Tamami Iinuma Solo Exhibition
“Salut, Mr Bruno Taut”
▼OPENING RECEPTION
August 29th (Saturday) | 17:00-18:00
■Period
August 29th (Saturday), 2026 - September 26th (Saturday), 2026
Wednesdays through Saturdays, 13:00-18:00
(closed on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and National Holidays)
■Venue
KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY
2-7-5-5F, Nishiazabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0031
■Organizer
Kana Kawanishi Art Office LLC.
from the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 841 × 594 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
from the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 841 × 594 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
Wohnanlage Ossastrasse
from the series Salut, Mr Bruno Taut | 2010 | archival pigment print | 841 × 594 mm
© Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Tamami Iinuma titled “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut,” beginning Saturday, August 29, 2026.
This exhibition commemorates the publication of Tamami Iinuma’s photo book of the same title, Salut, Mr Bruno Taut. Based in Leipzig, Paris, and Tokyo, Iinuma has presented her work by logically constructing the mediums of architecture, photography, and publishing through her own physical experience. In this series, she presents works photographed in Berlin and Magdeburg between 2010 and 2014, focusing on the “Siedlungen” (housing estates) designed by architect Bruno Taut in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
After moving to Berlin in 2008, Iinuma spent a long time photographing these landscapes while visiting the apartment complexes scattered throughout the city’s outskirts. Her focus is not merely on documenting the forms and structures of modern architecture. She captures the colors of the walls, the atmosphere around the windows, parked cars, traces of repainting, and the trees that have grown alongside the buildings over time. Through these details, the passage of time—during which the architecture has continued to be used in people’s daily lives—and the nature of that accumulation come to light.
For Iinuma, these photographs are like letters or postcards sent to Taut, conveying the message, “Your buildings are being lived in like this now.” The locations chosen for the photographs are places where a dialogue with the buildings can take place. Taken with the intention of sending a message to Taut while distancing themselves from conventional “architectural photography,” these images can be described as sketches of architecture. A sketch is a one-time creation; there is no second attempt at redrawing or finalizing it—and this sense lends each photograph its own unique immediacy.
Berlin has many overcast days, and the photography was often conducted under thick clouds. As a result, a pleasing contrast emerges between the soft brightness of the sky and the vivid colors applied to the buildings. The fact that these colors have existed in this city from the 1930s to the present was a source of pure surprise and elation for Iinuma. It is a landscape that resonates with Taut’s intention to weather Berlin’s harsh winters with a little more vitality through these vivid colors.
In the early stages of the project, Iinuma used the “Mamiya RZ67,” a medium-format camera often employed for portrait photography. She explains that, to her, architecture appeared not merely as a structure, but as a subject possessing a presence equal to that of a human being. However, after repeated instances of film malfunctions and development issues in sub-zero Berlin, the project gradually shifted to digital photography. This shift in photographic technique is also etched into the series as part of the passage of time it captures.
In this work, the trees planted on the premises serve as subjects just as important as the buildings themselves. Planted after the buildings were completed and having grown over many years, these trees stand there like actors narrating the architecture’s history. The building facades, the trees, and the shadows and sense of distance they create go beyond mere visual information to engage the viewer’s physical senses. After finishing a photo book that feels like an accumulation of wall surfaces, stepping out onto the street can feel as though the actual walls are closing in on you—this tactile quality is also one of the defining features of this series.
The title Salut, Mr Bruno Taut, which blends English and French, reflects Iinuma’s own linguistic sensibility, rooted in her experiences in cosmopolitan contemporary Berlin, where she has engaged in conversations—using imperfect, mixed languages—not only with Germans but with people from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, in this work centered on the German architect Bruno Taut—who had deep ties to Japan—the title embodies the intention to capture not a unification into a single language, but rather the very state of multiple languages intersecting.
Bruno Taut, who sought asylum in Japan and harbored a deep interest in Japanese culture, and Iinuma, who was born and raised in Tokyo before moving to Berlin. The perspectives of these two individuals, who lived in different eras and places, intersect through the landscapes of architecture and the city. The layers of time preserved in architectural and urban landscapes, the lives of the people who have lived within them, and the one-of-a-kind sketches born from a dialogue with the buildings. We cordially invite all to experience Taut’s architecture and the Berlin landscape—which continues to breathe even after the passage of time—as brought to life through Tamami Iinuma’s photographs.
 Waldsiedlung Onkel Toms Hüttefrom the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2011 | archival pigment print | 1189 × 841 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |  Gartenstadt Falkenbergfrom the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 594 × 420 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
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 Siedlung Schillerparkfrom the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 841 × 594 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |  Gartenstadt Falkenbergfrom the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 594 × 420 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
 Wohnstadt Carl Legienfrom the series “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” | 2010 | archival pigment print | 841 × 594 mm | © Tamami Iinuma, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY |
▼Monograph: Salut, Mr Bruno Taut
photographs/edit: Tamami Iinuma
text: Thibaut du Ruyter, Tamami Iinuma
design: Kenta Shibano
printing: Live Art Books Inc.
publisher: House of Architecture
size/spec: 191×144mm, 64p, 40 photographs, saddle stitch binding
ISBN：978-4-9911475-5-5
5,500 JPY (tax incl.)
Photography and Habitation: House of Architecture
To feel architecture as if it were human.
Architecture as a material is cold and silent. Sometimes, however, I cannot help but feel a sense of familiarity, attachment, respect, or even admiration. This is probably because of the accumulated history and memories of people’s lives latent in these buildings, or the many small stories that do not become history turn into “architectural imagination” and stir us to create and think. I have relied on this sense to take photographs in Tokyo, where I was born and raised; in Berlin and Leipzig, where I spent the 2010s; and in the various other cities that I have traveled to.
When I photograph architecture, I rarely set up a tripod. Instead, I hold the camera in my hand and take snapshots.
Fragments that are not enough to capture the entire architecture—the corners of rooms at the nexus of a wall and ceiling; the geometric surfaces emerging from the compositions of the doors and walls unshown on the plans; or, the floor, where countless footprints have come and gone. I think my lens turns to these because their fragmentary nature reminds us of the landscape that spreads outside of them.
Architectural fragments are like entrances to “passages” that let us leap across space and time. These passages lead from architecture to history and stories, and from the present to the past and future. Perhaps the reason I make not only photograph prints but also artist books is that I want to give form to these “passages” and convey to others the joy of the adventure of going through them.
Just as humans live in their “houses”—their habitations—, buildings live in the city and landscape, the houses that spread outside of them—this is how I look at the nested structure of housing and the experience of the “House of Architecture.” When I can capture this with my camera, I feel that I am “inside” something, and notice that I can breathe there with actuality. It is as if my own architecture, my house, is rising in the traces of my photographic act.
We all need such a place. Thus, I will continue to see architecture, take photographs, make books, reassure the world I live in, and cherish my own habitat.
Tamami Iinuma
Artist Profile
Tamami Iinuma was born in Tokyo, Japan. Under the theme of “House of Architecture,” Iinuma photographs architecture as accumulations of people’s memories, and cities and landscapes as habitations of architecture. From 2008, Iinuma studied abroad at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig for a year and resided in Leipzig until 2013 (received the Grant for Overseas Study, Pola Art Foundation in 2010). She resided in Cité Internationale des Arts for a year in 2014. She received her Ph.D. at Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School in 2018. She founded the publisher “House of Architecture” in 2020. She is currently based in Tokyo.
Her solo exhibitions include “Salut, Mr Bruno Taut” (2026, LAG [LIVE ART GALLERY], Tokyo), “Exploring White Small Architecture” (2023, Okaya Silk Museum / Okaya Art & Archaeological Museum, Nagano, Japan), “The 22nd Miki Jun Award Winner Exhibition ‘JAPAN IN DER DDR—I Found Three Japan Houses in GDR’” (2021, Nikon Plaza Tokyo), “JAPAN IN DER DDR—I Found Three Japan Houses in GDR” (2020, Nikon Salon Osaka; 2019, Nikon Salon Ginza, Tokyo) “Japan in der DDR - Gestohlene Erinnerungen wurden erneut zerstört” (2019, KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY, Tokyo), “Momentary Architecture” (2018, Pola Museum, Kanagawa, Japan), “House of Architecture” (2017, Roppongi Hills Club, Tokyo), “The 3rd Architecture - book, maison and forest” (2016, POST, Tokyo), and “JAPAN IN DER DDR” (2016, Motto Berlin, Germany).
Group exhibitions include “Seen, Remembered, Unmake” (2026, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo), “Is the Door Open?—Tracing the 40-year History of MOMAS and Its Collection” (2022, Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan), “Von Ferne. Bilder zur DDR” (2019, Museum Villa Stuck Munich, Germany), “Requiem for a Failed State” (2018, Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany), “Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox 1989-2017” (2017, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria), and “3 days exhibition” (2017, Sezon Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan).
Her monographs include the latest release, Salut, Mr Bruno Taut (2026, House of Architecture), JAPAN IN DER DDR (2019, self-publishing), House of Architecture (2016, limArt), and Landscape in Modern Architecture (2013, self-publishing).
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