Aki Sasamoto

Aki Sasamoto: the artist

Aki Sasamoto (Kanagawa, Japan, 1980; lives and works in New York) works at the intersection of performance, sculpture, installation, and video.

Her practice creates environments and situations in which objects and people engage in unusual interactions, exploring the relationship between body and space and aiming to activate the viewer on multiple sensory levels.

Through unconventional manipulations of everyday objects, Sasamoto stages performances that challenge traditional modes of perception, reimagining the possibilities and limitations of both sculptural and performative language. Her works unfold as immersive experiences that explore time, memory, and the peculiarities of human behavior. With a blend of playfulness and philosophical insight, she celebrates the eccentric, the undefined, and those liminal moments when the mind cannot longer distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative.

Drawing from a range of disciplines—including dance, mathematics, social psychology, meteorology, and eco-behavioral sciences—Sasamoto’s work is hybrid in both form and content. Personal experience and everyday life are filtered through a metaphorical lens to create narratives suspended between logic and intuition.

Her practice investigates questions of human connection, communication, emotional complexity, and habitual behavior, including obsessive tendencies and desire. Through offbeat humor and a stream-of-consciousness approach, she mines the absurdities of the everyday to reveal deeper existential truths.

The exhibition by Aki Sasamoto at Pirelli HangarBicocca

The exhibition by Sasamoto at Pirelli HangarBicocca marks the artist’s first major institutional presentation in Europe and brings together a constellation of works that span nearly two decades of artistic exploration.

Conceived as a dynamic sequence of sculptural installations and performances, the exhibition delves into Sasamoto’s ongoing inquiry into the notion of connection and the intricate structures of human relationships—how our bodies and memories are shaped by social norms and interpersonal dynamics.

Among the highlights of the exhibition are some of Sasamoto’s most significant installations, including Sounding Lines (2024), originally presented by Para Site in Hong Kong, Delicate Cycle (2016), conceived for the SculptureCenter in New York, and Strange Attractors (2010), which debuted at the Whitney Biennale 2010.