Aki Sasamoto was born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Japan and lives and works in Brooklyn. 

After graduating from Columbia University in 2007 with an MFA in Visual Arts, her work has been presented in various venues: galleries and art centers, theaters, and public spaces, where she regularly performs. 

 

Aki Sasamoto develops a transdisciplinary practice: sculptures, installations, dance, performances, videos. Her work explores the complexity of human nature through language and movement. She constructs and deconstructs the sometimes absurd lifestyles we are led to adopt. 

She is particularly interested in food, health, hygiene, everyday themes... everything that can be translated and diverted into absurd and poetic ceremonial 

during scripted performances.

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For the development of each of her projects, Sasamoto conducts a precise and meticulous research work, to find the best medium that will allow her to express her ideas. Her performances are realized with total commitment, sometimes to the point of physical limits. 

Performance being at the heart of her work, Sasamoto tries to find links between knowledge and know-how, gesture and intellect, sensibility and cognition, material and conceptual, and never ceases to lead a fundamental reflection on artistic creativity. 

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For her residency project at Atelier Calder, Aki Sasamoto returned to her experience of confinement in New York City in 2020, questioning the transition between closed and semi-open spaces or others that are transparent but closed. It is these different perceptions and sensations that she wished to translate and express with humor and poetry in this project carried out on the scale of the studio space. This project entitled "A Millimetre Difference" was conceived as a global project. Its realization process was the subject of a film, the public restitution was translated by a visit of workshop, and a filmed interview: 

Calder Digital Studio : https://youtu.be/dQXcxYWHxeU

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Her work has been shown at the Yokohama Triennial; St. Mark's Church in New York; The Kitchen in New York; Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Shanghai Biennale; Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; and Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Award winner, and in 2021 she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds degrees from Wesleyan University and Columbia University. Sasamoto teaches sculpture at Yale University.

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Photos Guillaume Blanc

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