Hermès Turned Its Tokyo Gallery Into a Club for the Dead. It Closes Sunday.

The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès is closing out a five-month exhibition at Le Forum, its gallery on the 8th floor of Hermès Maison Ginza in Tokyo, where Armenian-Lithuanian composer Andrius Arutiunian has built a speculative underworld. "Obol" runs through May 31. The show was curated by Tomoya Iwata, who directs The 5th Floor in Tokyo, on a carte blanche invitation from Le Forum's Reiko Setsuda.

Arutiunian trained as a composer, and the installations are organized around sound. A sculpture sits on a bed of bitumen, the viscous petroleum-derived material that paves modern roads and also, in older traditions, sealed the dead. An oversized speaker plays what the Foundation calls a chilling hymn. In a neighboring gallery, a synthetic choir, a laser altar, and a cryptic text stage a prospective ritual for "the end of days." Silver obols, the coins ancient Greeks placed in the mouths of the dead to pay Charon for passage across the river Styx, are scattered through the show as a kind of currency for a futuristic afterlife. Half temple, half rave.

The collision worth noticing is the timeline. Arutiunian is placing 2,500-year-old funeral coins next to generative sound synthesis, and the pairing reads as inevitable. The human need underneath (ritualizing passage, marking the line between one state and another) has not moved in two and a half millennia. What if more design started here, with that need, instead of with the dashboard or the feature list? Gentle Future covers the shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being. Arutiunian has taken it about as far as it goes, with objects deployed for the oldest human function we have, which is the marking of thresholds.