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AKI SASAMOTO

笹本 晃

Secrets of my Mother’s Child

AKI SASAMOTO

source: japancoolture

La prima personale dell’artista giapponese Aki Sasamoto (1980, Yokohama) giovanissima artista giapponese, trapiantata a New York, si è imposta sulla scena artistica internazionale con la sua arte che spazia dalla performance alla danza, dalla scultura al disegno, che realizzerà per l’occasione una nuova versione dell’installazione performativa Secrets of My Mother’s Child, presentata lo scorso 2009 al centro espositivo “The Kitchen” di New York.

L’enfante prodige dell’arte giapponese presenta a Milano una nuova versione dell’installazione performativa Secrets of My Mother’s Child, in cui aggiunge inediti elementi di scena. Attraverso la performance, la danza, l’uso di diversi oggetti, l’artista compie un viaggio all’interno di se stessa e analizza il rapporto con la madre, dall’adolescenza alle ultime esperienze. Cerca di far emergere un passato nascosto, domande per la madre che non è mai riuscita a fare, ma la comunicazione è impossibile, e viene interrotta. Aki Sasamoto ha iniziato ad interessarsi alla performance quando era una teenager e studiava le classiche arti giapponesi del koto, kyogen, e delbuyo, cioè musica, teatro e danza.

Nelle sue performance tratta spesso temi legati alla sua famiglia, alla sua identità, alle sue emozioni, e crea delle installazioni con oggetti trovati per strada o costruiti da lei. La sua arte è una fusione unica tra la sensibilità giapponese e l’educazione americana. Dalla tradizione giapponese prende l’arte della citazione che vuole la disposizione degli oggetti comuni in modo che si riferiscano ad immagini popolari o mitologiche, dall’educazione americana viene la sua abilità di trasformare oggetti raccolti per strada in opere d’arte. Una performance provocatoria, una danza, un dialogo tra una madre e una figlia che non riescono a comunicare, uno spettacolo di arte contemporanea che lascia senza parole.
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source: cargocollective

Secrets of My Mother’s Child is Installation/Performance works. During the gallery hours, the installation looks as if the setting right before the performance. Performance is a loosely combined vignettes. Pieces involved are: Airport Bathroom, Drawers Eats Memory, Pickling Pot, and X x Y =1.
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source: cargocollective

拾った家具 、日用品、クローゼットの中に仕込まれた3つのカメラ、スチールを組み合わせた彫刻が点在している。展示中は、パフォーマンスで使われるであろうモノや、特殊な効果を狙っているような仕掛けがあるのが、それぞれの家具に施された穴から伺えるようになっている。パフォーマンスは、クローゼットの内外を同時再生ビデオで捉えながら幼少期を振り返る1部、バンジーコードで引き出しに勝手に戻ってしまう靴や包丁のはめ込まれたサンダルでグレープフルーツジュースをつくりながら実母との交流を話す2部、刻んだスツールの脚や洗濯バサミで吊るされた私物の靴下を座標に見立ててX x Y=1のグラフを解説する3部、の3部構成。全体を通して、近しい人とのすれ違いを数学の公式に当てはめて考察する。
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source: whitneyorg

Aki Sasamoto’s installations and performances explore the nuances and peculiarities of everyday life. She uses sculpture, movement, video, and sound to transform mundane actions into theatrical events. Strange Attractors consists of a careful arrangement of sculpturally altered, found objects that take on new roles and provide guidance for Sasamoto’s improvisational performances that take place within the installation. The performances demonstrate Sasamoto’s attempt to understand the mathematic structure of the Lorenz Attractor, a fractal structure that works in a dynamic system. For her performances, Sasamoto also includes additional objects related to her recent obsessions with, among other things, doughnuts, fortune-tellers, and hemorrhoids.
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source: whitneyorg

Aki Sasamoto‘s contribution to 2010, Strange Attractors, consists of the careful arrangement of sculpturally altered found objects and insistent repetitions of performances that alter and add to the feelings of the installation; the objects themselves provide guidance for the artist’s structured improvisation. Sasamoto demonstrates and develops a kaleidoscopic worldview out of deeply personal episodes and a hypothetical mapping of the universe. In an attempt to understand and feel the mathematical concept of strange attractors in dynamical systems, she jumbles her recent obsession for doughnuts, fortunetellers, hemorrhoids, and things detected in the world.
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source: cargocollective

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based, Japanese artist, who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever more medium that takes to get her ideas across. Her works have been shown both in performing art and visual art venues in New York and abroad. Besides her own works, she has collaborated with artists in visual arts, music, and dance, and she plays multiple roles of dancer, sculptor, or director. Sasamoto co-founded Culture Push, a non-profit arts organization, in which diverse professionals meet through artist-led projects and cross-disciplinary symposia.

Sasamoto’s performance/installation works revolve around everyday gestures on nothing and everything. Her installations are careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects, and the decisive gestures in her improvisational performances create feedback, responding to sound, objects, and moving bodies. The constructed stories seem personal at first, yet oddly open to variant degrees of access, relation, and reflection.
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source: artinamericamagazine

New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto gained attention for her multimedium installation/performances at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. More recently, her first solo exhibition in New York featured humble dollar-store materials in an expansive, ephemeral installation of sound and sculpture titled “Talking in Circles in Talking.” The gallery walls were transformed into a climbing-wall-cum-whiteboard, creating a backdrop for several performances.

Sasamoto placed eight stainless-steel mixing bowls on the floor around the narrow gallery. An ice pick stood upright inside each bowl, and on its sharp tip balanced a smaller steel bowl, face down. Above these precarious contraptions hung large chunks of ice suspended in loosely woven baskets made of brightly colored shoelaces. As the ice melted, the pinging of the drips on the metal was amplified through small microphones, filling the gallery with percussive, Tin Pan Alley-like sounds. Frozen inside the ice were small items, including keys, eyeglasses and wristwatches, symbolizing the “owned” nature of objects. According to Sasamoto, at the time of death, people become the objects that they are physically close to, in the way ice becomes water—a theory she articulated during her performances.

Several large illuminated globe lamps, some humorously outfitted with brightly colored and patterned panties, were positioned here and there. Sasamoto crafted the lamps from large, translucent rubber balls attached to handheld showerheads with long, snaking plastic hoses. Two of these globes were affixed to moving chairs, which the artist made from disparate chair seats, legs and wheels. The artist’s quietly clever skill at functional assemblage extended to the woven shoelaces holding the ice, which involved the same complex technique used to make nets for buoys.

During the opening night performance, the artist allowed her multitudinous ideas to speak through her objects. Beginning with a somber, poetic eulogy, she explained that, in death, her grandfather became “an abacus with ivory beads that he kept in his shirt pocket, keeping his calculations close to his heart.” After the eulogy, Sasamoto proved adept at manipulating the emotional tenor of the room. She created a disquieting tension as she prowled through the crowded gallery, casually pushing people aside, rolling around on the altered chairs, wrapping the lamps around her body and stabbing ice picks into the wall.

Sasamoto’s work relates to the Japanese postwar movements Gutai and Mono-ha. In Gutai, artists did not so much change materials as bring them to life, often through physical interaction with them. From this perspective, Sasamoto’s everyday items are reborn with alternative uses and new realities. Mono-ha’s emphasis on dialogue between natural and man-made materials can also be found in various aspects of Sasamoto’s practice.

Transitioning moods again during the performance, the artist took on the demeanor of a weary fashion doyenne. She delivered what could be described as a panty rant, drawing diagrams on the walls and claiming that panties are a place of “pride, taste and statement.” She warned would-be leopard print panty wearers to exercise caution: “Don’t do it. If you’re not 100 percent leopard . . . don’t become an irresponsible tourist of fantasies.” At the conclusion, Sasamoto climbed the wall using the ice picks and magic markers plastered into the surface and sat on a wooden seat near the ceiling. Seemingly 100 percent leopard—and all performer—she retired to a feline’s perch, gazing down at the audience below.
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source: parasophiajp

笹本晃(ささもと あき)
1980年横浜生まれ、ニューヨークを拠点に活動

日本で高校を中退し、イギリスとアメリカの大学や大学院にて数学、ダンス、美術、彫刻などを学ぶ。コロンビア大学大学院美術課程修了。空間を彫刻的に分節し、その環境の中で自らの身体によるダンス、言葉、モノを用いて即興的なパフォーマンスを行う作品を数多く発表している。彼女の日常的な出来事や行為から着想され即興的な展開に見えるその作品は、実は緻密に構成されたもので、インスタレーションの静止空間と動的パフォーマンスとが複雑に交差する迷宮的物語世界となっている。横浜トリエンナーレ2008、ホイットニー・ビエンナーレ2010、第9回光州ビエンナーレ(2012)、六本木クロッシング2013(森美術館)などに参加。2014年にはニューヨークのオルタナティブスペース、ザ・キッチンにて『Sunny in the Furnace』を発表した。