Yuko Mohri

Wednesday 19 October, 7.00 – 8.00pm

Writer Agnieszka Gratza talks with residency artist Yuko Mohri about her work which looks at ideas of flux, instability and intangible energies.

Agnieszka Gratza is a writer currently based in London. Her writings about art, performance and film have appeared in frieze, ArtReview, Artforum, Flash Art, Metropolis M, PAJ, Sight & Sound, The Guardian and The Observer. She has published articles on the subject of Renaissance intellectual and cultural history and her written work often stems from live art and performance.

Supported by Nissan Art Award, Arts Initiative Tokyo, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Angela Koulakoglou

Friday 6 July, 6.30 – 7.30pm
White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer St, Fitzrovia, London W1W 8HJ

Camden Arts Centre and White Rainbow present a talk between the independent curator Jason Waite and Yuko Mohri. Mohri and Waite will discuss their work and reflect on the social imaginaries of contemporary Japan, with particular reference to artists’ practices following the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster in 2011.

Jason Waite is an independent curator and cultural worker focused on forms of practice producing agency. Recent projects have centred on working in sites of crisis amidst the detritus of capitalism, looking for tools and radical imaginaries for different ways of living and working together. He has co-curated Don’t Follow the Wind an ongoing project inside the uninhabited Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan; The Real Thing?; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Maintenance Required, The Kitchen, New York, and White Paper: The Law by Adelita Husni-Bey at Casco, Utrecht. He holds an M.A. in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths College, London and was a Helen Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow, at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York 2012-13.

White Rainbow is a non-profit organisation based in central London which champions the work of emerging and mid-career contemporary Japanese artists, spotlighting artistic practices underrepresented in the UK. The gallery supports work in a range of media, with particular focus on performance, film and installation-based practices.

White Rainbow’s 2018/19 programme presents a series of six solo exhibitions and projects by leading contemporary Japanese artists Chikako Yamashiro, Chim Pom, Aki Sasamoto, Taro Izumi, Meiro Koizumi and Mari Katayama.

Saturday 7 July 2018, 1.00pm

To coincide with Yuko Mohri’s exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, a performance with Japanese sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki will be presented in Mohri’s installation. The performance draws on Mohri’s background in music and long-standing engagement with the experimental music scene in Japan.

Since the 1960s, sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki has been investigating the acoustic quality of selected locations and creating corresponding topographies. His intensive involvement with the phenomena of pulse and echo led him to develop his own instruments in the 1970s. One of these is the spiral echo instrument Analapos. It consists of a coil spring and two iron cylinders that function as resonating chambers, and is played with the voice or by hand. Starting from the 90s, his soundwalk project, oto-date, which means, respectively, “sound” and “point” in Japanese, finds listening points in the city, and playfully invites the audience to stop and listen carefully at given points on the map. Suzuki has been also active in the improvised music scenes in different continents, and has collaborated with Takehisa Kosugi, Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, David Toop, Aki Onda, Rie Nakajima, and John Butcher.

Video stills ©Helen Petts

This event has been programmed with 33:33 and forms part of MODE – a programme of music, visual art, performance and film curated by Ryuichi Sakamoto

In partnership with Japan Foundation