PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

Aki Sasamoto (笹本晃)
b. 1980 in Yokohama, Japan; based in New York
www.akisasamoto.com

Work in exhibition
The Last Call, Wrong Happy Hour, 2015
Performance/installation

See all installation views at higher resolution: www.flickr.com/photos/parasophia/sets/72157656808473196

Aki Sasamoto left her high school in Japan and went on to study mathematics, dance, art, and sculpture as an undergraduate and graduate student in the UK and the US, completing the MFA program at Columbia University. She creates many works that involve the interplay between performances and installations, delivering improvisational performances in sculpturally defined spaces using her own body movements and dance, words, objects, and more. Although her works are ostensibly improvisational, with their inspirations in events and actions in her daily life, they are in fact very carefully constructed, weaving together the stillness of installations and the motion of performance to create complex, labyrinthine spatial narratives. Group exhibitions include Yokohama Triennale 2008, the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012), and Roppongi Crossing 2013 (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo). In 2014, Sasamoto presented Sunny in the Furnace at The Kitchen, an alternative space for art and performance in New York.
At Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, she presents a three-part work consisting of a video installation based on the installation/performance Wrong Happy Hour, which she just finished showing in New York; the performance Last Call, Wrong Happy Hour; and a follow-up to the performance. Sasamoto continually expands her own territory with singular interpretations and methods that change with each new work, efficiently creating a sense of alienation that enables us, the viewers, to broaden our own perceptions of art as well.

• Horikawa Housing Complex