Aki Sasamoto, born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1980, lives and works in Brookyln.
She is an artist who cycles through mediums tailored to each project, including performance, sculpture, video, and dance. Her practice is marked by interdisciplinary collaboration—with scientists, scholars, as well as other artists—and she identifies alternately as performer, dancer, sculptor, writer, and director.
Sasamoto's installation and performance work often features the artist moving through careful arranged objects while delivering digressive monologues. The artist alters the the things she uses for her work, for example in Sounding Lines (2024), which is an intricate web of metal line, springs, hand-made fishing lures with kitchen utensils embedded in them. All this floated in the exhibition space to be manipulated during Sasamoto's performative activation. The work speaks to harmonic patterns that occur in sound waves and in friendships. In her site-specific installation and performance, Spirits Cubed (2020), Sasamoto collected material debris from the renovation of the exhibition space, which was an apple cider factory. She placed ladders, doors marked with duct apertures, external gates, and windows, in a that invited both the wind and spirits to circulate. The artist writes, "Drawing inspiration from brewing and distillation processes, I constructed a wind circulation diagram using glass and ducts. It seems empty, yet something differs between inside and outside. The way the wind blows can completely transform both life and stories."
Solo exhibitions of Aki Sasamoto's work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2025), the Queens Museum in New York (2023), Take Ninagawa in Tokyo (2017, 2022), and the Kitchen (2017). Her was included in the 59th Venice Biennale and the Busan Biennial, both in 2022, as well as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016, the Gwangju Biennial in 2012, the 2010 Whitney Biennial 2010 and in Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1 in New York, and the Yokohama Triennale in 2008. Sasamoto holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York.
* cargocollective.com/akisasamoto/Spirits-Cubed
Price: 80 Sek (free admission for students)
Tickets: Link will be published when Mötesplats Mariatorget have tickets ready
World in My Eyes – An Artist Lecture Series
All the islands in the ocean
All the heavens in the motion
Let me show you the world in my eyes
// Depeche Mode (1990)
In its third season, the artist talk series World in My Eyes presents Ibrahim Mahama, Aki Sasamoto and Zoe Leonard. Each artist contributes to both the discursive and formal hybridity of contemporary art at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility and increasing polarization.
Launched in 2023, World in My Eyes is an artist lecture series in Stockholm presented through a collaboration between Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design; Moderna Museet; and the Royal Institute of Art and hosted by Mötesplats Mariatorget. Its title drawn from the eponymous 1990s electronic music hit by English band Depeche Mode, the series aims to present artistic perspectives from a wide range of media that are changing the relationship between material processes and socio-political imagination.