Pirelli HangarBicocca: Aki Sasamoto
- Redazione
- Aug 11
- 8 min read
Opening September 16, 2026
September 17, 2026 - January 17, 2027
“The world I touch and the world I understand through language are so different. The world only makes sense somewhere between what I perceive and what I ultimately make of it,” says Aki Sasamoto.
From September 17, 2026 to January 17, 2027, Pirelli HangarBicocca presents XYZ, Aki Sasamoto’s first solo exhibition at a European institution. Spanning more than twenty years of interdisciplinary experimentation, the exhibition brings together science and intuition, mathematics and emotion, absurdity and seriousness, the everyday and the extraordinary. Through sculptures, installations and performances, Sasamoto explores themes of human and social relationships, memory and emotional experience, creating a journey that unites intellectual rigour with profound humanity.
At the intersection of performance, sculpture, installation and video, Aki Sasamoto (Kanagawa, Japan, 1980; lives and works in New York) creates environments and situations in which people and objects interact, investigating the relationship between body and space while engaging audiences on multiple sensory levels. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as dance, mathematics, social psychology, meteorology and eco-behavioural sciences, her works—hybrid in both form and content—translate personal experiences into a rich metaphorical language, evoking liminal moments and new narratives suspended between logic and intuition. Through unexpected interactions with everyday objects, often altered and transformed, Sasamoto stages a tragicomic theatre that challenges conventional modes of perception and redefines the possibilities and limits of sculptural and performative language. As the artist herself explains, “My work deals with the problems of life, not art,” grounding her practice in lived reality while offering a subjective vision of the world that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.
After leaving Japan to study mathematics, first in Wales and later in the United States, Aki Sasamoto completed her academic path by earning a degree in dance from Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), followed by an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York. This experience of distancing herself from her place of origin and familiar surroundings has profoundly shaped her work, which explores psychological dimensions, the complexity of emotions and habits, interpersonal relationships, and the tensions that emerge through processes of communication.
Having approached art through dance and theatrical performance, Sasamoto became fascinated by the improvisational nature of jazz and developed an early interest in the sonic and gestural experiments of the 1950s and 1960s. Among her key influences are composers such as John Cage (1912–1992), David Tudor (1926–1996), and above all Alvin Lucier (1931–2021).
XYZ, curated by Roberta Tenconi with Tatiana Palenzona, is the Japanese artist’s first institutional exhibition in Europe. The title immediately suggests the layered nature of the project, presenting a selection of works spanning two decades of artistic practice. XYZ carries multiple meanings: they are the final letters of the alphabet, suggesting possible continuations beyond the end of a list; in the Cartesian coordinate system, they define the three dimensions of space; in quantum physics, they denote variables used to describe the probability of a particle occupying a given position; and they also form the acronym for “eXamine Your Zipper,” a common expression in the United States discreetly used to let someone know that their zipper is open.
The exhibition conceived by Sasamoto for Pirelli HangarBicocca unfolds as a dynamic sequence of installations, sculptures, videos and performances exploring the idea of connection, the complexity of relationships, and the influence of social norms and interpersonal interactions on the body and memory. Bringing together more than twenty years of interdisciplinary experimentation, the exhibition highlights the artist’s ability to reconcile apparent opposites—performance and sculpture, science and intuition, absurdity and rigour—in works that are at once playful, precise and deeply human. References to mathematics recur throughout the exhibition in the form of diagrams, lines and rotating mechanisms, connecting the works while bringing together material and immaterial dimensions, creating a constant tension between measurable data and emotional experience.
As Sasamoto explains, “Diagrams are reflections of discomfort in life—a way of getting to its core. I want to take emotion seriously, but it’s difficult to embrace it as it is. Diagrams seem lighter and more detached than serious language expressed with a straight face. I prefer standing at the blackboard, drawing, with my back turned to the world.”
While each work maintains its own autonomy, the exhibition establishes connections between works from different moments in Sasamoto’s career, creating a constantly evolving system of meanings that invites visitors to reflect on the present and on the possible trajectories of contemporary life.
Upon entering the Shed, visitors encounter the kinetic installation Sounding Lines (2024), composed of springs suspended in space and oversized fishing lures incorporating kitchen utensils. Activated by programmed motors, the springs oscillate, evoking the movement of waves and, more subtly, the unstable and fluctuating rhythms of human relationships and friendships. Fishing, food and cooking—all recurring gestures and practices in Sasamoto’s work, rooted in everyday life—emerge here as an ambivalent metaphor. This imagery resurfaces in catch or be caught (2025), a sculpture composed of two metal structures that move vertically in an alternating sequence, opening and closing in a motion that shifts between the shape of a traditional crab trap and an organic form resembling a stylised flower. The resulting mechanical choreography prompts a reflection on physical tension and the vulnerability of space.
Continuing through the exhibition, Delicate Cycle (2016) explores the idea of nonlinear time and questions the very notion of the cycle. This process emerges both through the presence of washing machines and through the evocation of the movement of the dung beetle, a creature that has fascinated the artist since childhood. Circular motion thus becomes an underlying thread running through the exhibition, including in the performance in which Sasamoto activates the work by rolling a large sphere covered in sheets. This gesture prompts a reflection on anxieties surrounding order and control, extending the logic of washing to the workings of memory and to the illusion that a stain can be permanently erased.
Many of Sasamoto’s works originate from personal life experiences, such as the installation and performance Secrets of My Mother’s Child (2009), which addresses the theme of intergenerational trauma. Furniture and everyday objects evoke the domestic sphere while simultaneously suggesting, in almost architectural terms, the emotional structures of family life. Through an exploration of the dynamics and tensions within her relationship with her mother, the work opens up a reflection on the nature of secrecy. As the artist explains, “I’m fascinated by the transition from secret to revealed fact.” This tension between proximity and distance, knowledge and mystery, takes sculptural form in a suspended metal bar based on the mathematical function x × y = 1, whose two asymptotes approach infinity without ever touching. The image thus becomes a metaphor for the secret itself—something one longs to know, yet which inevitably ceases to be a secret once it is revealed.
The use of everyday materials also features prominently in Centrifugal March (2012), in which Sasamoto incorporates domestic furnishings such as wardrobes and beds to reflect on centrifugal forces. These are accompanied by ice, an unstable and constantly changing material that introduces a temporal and sonic dimension to the work. As it slowly melts, the ice produces a subtle amplified sound that marks the passage of time and accompanies the transformation of matter, while simultaneously evoking themes of memory and rituals associated with preserving the body after death. Conceived for the Whitney Biennial, Strange Attractors (2010) unfolds as a constellation of suspended elements—including tables, closed-circuit cameras and drinking glasses held in fruit nets—forming an environment of altered and reconfigured domestic objects. In mathematics, and according to chaos theory, a “strange attractor” is a dynamic structure in which multiple elements coexist, generating a system in which order emerges from apparent disorder.
Among the other works included in the exhibition is Wrong Happy Hour (2014), an installation that transforms the exhibition space into a dysfunctional bar. Inside the Shed, the environment will be visible only from the rear, while from outside the building, through a glass door, visitors will be able to see it in its entirety. During the performance, the installation is activated as a real bar, where visitors can drink and spend time inside, while Sasamoto moves among the objects and addresses questions to the audience. She eventually pushes the visitors physically out of the space by moving the back wall, creating a relational environment that gradually contracts until it excludes them altogether. Alongside the installation, the video of the same title revisits and reworks the narrative of the artist’s monologue during the performance.
The bar motif also returns in Past in a Future Tense (2019), an equally dysfunctional version of a place of encounter and social interaction, in which the elements are connected through the movement of air. Whiskey glasses move inside hand-blown Murano glass spheres arranged on small tables and along a bar counter, activated solely by air currents. The installation is accompanied by the videos Weather Bar Forecast #1 and Weather Bar Forecast #2 (2021), which adopt the format of televised weather forecasts while heightening the dissonance between the measured, factual language employed and the increasingly unstable and alarming reality of climate disasters.
Presented at Pirelli HangarBicocca through video documentation, Cooking Show (2005) belongs to the early phase of Sasamoto’s artistic practice, when her work developed within the theatrical field and explored the boundaries between performance and live entertainment. Seeking to deconstruct the surreal aesthetics and eccentric logic of television cooking shows, the artist performs conventional culinary procedures using disproportionately large utensils, altering the sequence of actions and introducing unexpected information. The deliberately exaggerated scale of the objects transforms them into tools through which to articulate the inherent difficulties of interpersonal communication, rendering everyday actions comically impractical and visually jarring.
The Artist
The artist has presented solo exhibitions and projects at numerous institutions, including Studio Voltaire, London (2026); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) (2025); Para Site, Hong Kong (2024); Queens Museum, New York (2023); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2023); Danspace Project, New York (2020); The Kitchen, New York (2017); SculptureCenter, New York (2016); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2012).
Sasamoto has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2024); San José Museum of Art (2024); Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, California (2024); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2023, 2013); Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, South Korea (2022); Kunsthal Rotterdam (2021); Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori, Japan (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2016); and High Line Art, New York (2014).
Her works and performances have also been presented at major international biennials, including the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Aichi Triennale (2022); Busan Biennale (2022); Okayama Art Summit (2022); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016); Whitney Biennial and Greater New York (2010); and Yokohama Triennale (2008).
In 2023, Sasamoto was awarded the Calder Prize, following a residency at Atelier Calder in Saché, France, in 2021. She is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art.
Information
Aki Sasamoto
September 17, 2026
Pirelli HangarBicocca
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