Take Ninagawa is pleased to announce the opening of Aki Sasamoto's first exhibition with the gallery, "Strange Attractors." Sasamoto will be presenting for the first time to Japanese audiences her installation and performance Strange Attractors (2010), commissioned for the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Currently based in New York and also active in cultural organization and theatre production, Aki Sasamoto is known in the contemporary art context primarily for works combining sculptural installations and live performance. While the installations generally serve as the frameworks for the performances, these two elements share a non-hierarchical relationship that disorients preconceptions of how we perceive and interact with our everyday environments. As Sasamoto has noted previously, sometimes it is the objects in the installations that perform while the body of the artist is relegated to the object status of framework. Far from seeking a utopic, humanist image of a unifying order that gives meaning to the world, Sasamoto turns to the fundamentally atomized nature of the world as a starting point for reassessing how to respond to a reality without meaning.

Inspired by the mathematical concept of the Lorenz Attractor in Dynamical Systems, Strange Attractors addresses topics including doughnuts, hemorrhoids and psychics. The installation at the Whitney included an arrangement of café tables, doughnut-shaped cushions, industrial pipes, projectors and an audio system, as well as multiple objects and video cameras suspended from the ceiling in red fishnet sacks. With viewers crowded into the gallery space, the performance wove together prepared material, spontaneous ad-libs and wide-ranging movements into a chaotic narrative that brought audience, artwork and artist into dynamic contact with each other. Sasamoto is adapting this piece specifically for Take Ninagawa, and will incorporate into the work new Japanese-language material.

Performances of Strange Attractors are scheduled at the gallery starting from 1600 hrs on select dates that include the numerals 6 and 9.

Born in 1980 in Yokohama, Aki Sasamoto earned an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2007. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and at venues including the 3rd Yokohama Triennale (2008), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008), Zach Feuer Gallery, New York (2009), The Kitchen, New York (2009), the Whitney Biennial, New York (2010), and Greater New York (2010). She is a co-founder of the New York-based organization Culture Push. This is her first exhibition with Take Ninagawa gallery.

* The text provided by Take Ninagawa.

Opened dates: December 18, 2010 - January 29, 2011
Opening reception: December 18, 2010, start at 18:00