Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection Book Launch

Join us on Thursday, May 9 for the launch of CARA's newest publication Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection, co-published with Queens Museum. The launch will feature a conversation with artist Aki Sasamoto and contributors to the book Lumi Tan and Hitomi Iwasaki.

The book follows artist Aki Sasamoto’s idiosyncratic practice, which draws on performance, dance, installation, video, and linguistic play to test the limits of our knowledge and experience of natural and human phenomena. Her improvisatory and experimental approach unravels her artistic research with curiosity, play, and pathos, revealing chains of associations that hold the most personal and mundane variables in tension with the most persistent and expansive metaphysical and scientific mysteries.

Titled after the geometric condition wherein every point is reflected across a specific fixed point, Point Reflection asks how we identify and engage with moments of change, transformation, and rupture. In her writing on aging, vulnerability, the passage of time, and living a (non)normative life, Sasamoto turns to the metaphor of snail shell chirality–the direction in which the snail shell coils–to imagine the inverted horizon beyond the point reflection where all things are otherwise, but also still themselves, and ask, “When do you decide to go the other way?”

The first major volume devoted to the artist's work, Point Reflection combines the diagrammatic drawings, narrative experimentation, structured improvisations, and stream of consciousness monologues characteristic of Sasamoto’s performances and installations, with a critical essay by Lumi Tan, interviews conducted by the artist with biologists Erynn Johnson and Masaki Hoso, and an afterword by Queens Museum curator, Hitomi Iwasaki.

Learn more about the book here.

More about the speakers

Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980, Kanagawa, Japan) is a New York-based artist working in performance, installation, and video to explore the questions and conditions underlying the systems and structures of everyday life. She has had solo exhibitions and performances at venues including: Arts and Letters, New York (2023); Danspace Project, New York (2020); The Kitchen, New York (2017); and SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2015). Sasamoto has been included in group exhibitions including: 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2022); and Aichi Triennale, Aichi, Japan (2022); Kunsthal Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2022); the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori, Japan (2020); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India (2016); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2012); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010) and Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, Long Island City, New York (2010), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at Atelier Calder, Saché, France (2021) and is a recipient of the Calder Prize (2023). She is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale School of Art.

Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York. She is currently the curatorial director of Luna Luna, a traveling art amusement park that originated in a 1987 project conceived by André Heller. She was previously senior curator at The Kitchen, New York, where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, and many exhibition catalogs. She was the recipient of the 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship.

Hitomi Iwasaki is Head of Exhibitions and Curator at the Queens Museum. She has worked on landmark exhibitions including Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins 1950s-1980s (1999–2001) and Caribbean: Crossroad of the World (2012), as well as numerous group exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists, including iterations of Queens International (2002, 2004, 2014 and 2016). She organized Bringing the World into the World (2015), a major exhibition that centered around the Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York and its 50th anniversary, and major solo presentations of Patty Chang (2018) and Christine Sun Kim (2022).