Aki
Sasamoto
She // Her // Hers
[ID: Aki, a Japanese woman with medium length black hair, stands by an empty shelf space in an old Japanese apartment building. She has a big smile and is wearing a loose sweatshirt with bold colorful prints.]
New York, NY
2021 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the USA Ambassadors.
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Aki Sasamoto works in sculpture, performance, video, and more. In Sasamoto’s installation/performance works, she moves and talks inside careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating the bizarre emotions behind daily life.
Her installation/performance works have been shown at odd sites as well as at numerous international and domestic venues, including SculptureCenter, the Kitchen, and the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York; the National Museum of Art in Osaka; the 2012 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea; and the 2016 Shanghai Biennale. Her work includes collaborations with musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, and engineers.
She is an assistant professor in the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art. Sasamoto likes food; donuts, grapefruits, potatoes, coffee, and well drinks appear in some of her works.
Portrait photo by Takehiro Iikawa.
Yield Point, 2017. Mixed-media installation/performance with modified dumpsters, handmade trampolines, trash bags, and more, dimensions variable. 30 minutes. Photo by Jason Mandella; courtesy The Kitchen.[ID: In a gallery space, a dumpster is split in two and each half moves along train rails. The main entrance door is spanned by a trampoline, and trash bags are held up on walls by static electricity.]
Delicate Cycle, 2016, Mixed-media installation/performance with industrial laundry machines, dimensions variable. 30 minutes. Photo by Kyle Knodell; courtesy SculptureCenter.[ID: A view of laundry machines and a television monitor mounted high on the wall. Sasamoto spins inside a modified washing machine, holding the microphone as she reads from a book. The monitor screens the view from inside the washer.]