Performance: Aki Sasamoto

Clothes Line is a solo exhibition by Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980, Kanagawa, Japan), presented at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London. The exhibition marked Sasamoto’s first presentation at a UK gallery and brought together drawings and films documenting her performance installations, alongside a new performance created for the exhibition.

Based in New York, Sasamoto works across performance, sculpture, dance, drawing and installation, using gestures, improvisation and the relationships between bodies, objects and spaces as starting points for her practice. The exhibition included drawings made during performances at JTT, SculptureCenter and The Kitchen in New York. Sasamoto describes these drawings as diagrams: visual records of thoughts and actions made during performances that function like musical notation or scores. Recording the particular circumstances of each performance, they remain as physical traces of actions that would otherwise disappear.

Clothes Line brought together traces of past performances with new work, exploring improvisation, chance and the relationships between bodies, objects and spaces. The accompanying catalogue featured a newly commissioned text by Chris Fite-Wassilak and a conversation between Aki Sasamoto and Jennifer Krasinski.