4 April – 12 May, 2012

Opening reception: 4 April 2012 at 6.00 p.m.
Secrets of My Mother’s Child performance starting at 7.30 p.m.

The Jerome Zodo Contemporary is proud to present the Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto's first solo show with the gallery (1980, Yokohama), who, for the occasion, has created a new version of her performance installation Secrets of My Mother's Child, presented in 2009 at the Exposition Centre “The Kitchen”, in New York.

Aki Sasamoto is one of the most interesting artists of the contemporary Japanese panorama. After having participated at the Triennial in Yokohama in 2008, she established herself on the international artistic scene at the Biennial of Whitney in 2010, at The Greater New York: 5 Year Review Exhibition at MOMA PS1 in New York, moving on to Moscow at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. Her latest work includes, a personal exhibition with Take Ninagawa Gallery in the Frame section in FRIEZE, in London, a participation at the Lalit Kara Academy Exhibition Centre in New Delhi, in India, and a brief exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College in New York.

In an expressive vocabulary that portrays diferent areas of visual representation, from physiological expression to sculptural assembly through performance action, the search of the young Sasamoto inevitably blends with her own native culture, fowing into a territory that is always on the edge of daily living in which objects, presences and gestures continually take on new perspectives, questioning the complexity, heterogeneousness and variety of events and things.

While interaction is always at the foundation of each of her installations, her questing spirit becomes the constant in her creative performance. Why do some objects appear to be more important than others (Centrifugal March, 2012)?
Where does our sense of health or aesthetic come from? How do you measure aggression in the frame of beauty (Beauty Lines, 2010)? The exploration of diferent unknowns constitutes the development of an action that gradually unfolds in poses and propaedeutic movements; rhythms, passages and transformations design lines in a spatial ensemble that serve for pure equilibrium, between the forms and body of the artist. In the dialogue structure of her work, the formalism and expression of a word, a gesture or an object go beyond the functional usage of the objects themselves, creating the birth of poetry that makes use of the absurd and improbable as the only source of imagination.

Her work, Secrets of My Mother's Child, has been rethought for the Milanese public taking on new scenic elements. The diferent performance vignettes, Drawers Eats Memory, Airport Bathroom, Pickling Pot, and X x Y =1, portray how the artist examines the principles of her own maternal ties, from her adolescence up to the present-day. The relationship is analysed and projected onto the relational rails on which two individuals are not capable of communicating.

In Aki Sasamoto’s space of creative stimulation many traditional Japanese elements coexist, for example, a recall to Mitate, the art of citation that refers to popular or mythological images in common everyday objects. The concept of object is expressed in Japanese by the word Mono, which refers in origin to an object that has the dual ability of both a visible and invisible dimension in the world. The Mono consists of two parts, an aspect leading to its classifcation and description, and another one that easily escapes from any analytical approach. The second is often understood as a causal or chaotic element, which resists the order of classifcation and is considered to be the evidence of the entropic phenomenon in the cultural system. The Mono does not signify a single existence but rather a plural existence, in virtue its relationship with the other objects. The disposition of visible objects amplifes the perception of absolute reality, giving form and allowing the collective memory to reveal itself. On the wake of these concepts, an object reveals diferent meanings when it is placed out of its own context, thus evoking the totality of cultural relations. The work of Aki Sasamoto shows the will to place the invisible through the visible order of things, this practice evidences the cosmological structure of her representations. Always meeting the spatial discussion, diferent, according to the context of who is intervening, the artist’s action becomes totem-like, each object like each event for her becoming a connecting tool, mental or social, no longer simply connected to its own physicality or identity.

Aki Sasamoto was born in 1980 in Yokohama in Japan. She moved to New York, gaining an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2007. Her work has been presented at various and important international artistic events: the Third Edition of the Yokohama Triennial (2008); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); Zach Feuer Gallery, New York (2009); The Kitchen, New York (2009); Whitney Biennial, New York (2010; The Greater New York, MOMA PS1 (2010); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia (2010); Take Ninagawa Gallery in the Frame section, Frieze Art Fair (2011); Lalit Kara Academy, New Delhi, India (2012); Take Ninagawa Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2010 and 2012); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York (2012). Furthermore, Aki Sasamoto is the co-Founder of the Culture Push organisation in New York.