Following the MEP studio in 2021, here are the disturbing textile and photographic works of Japanese artist Mari Katayama presented in the Project Room of the Suzanne Tarasiève gallery.
« Beautiful like the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. "Adopted by the surrealists, this famous verse from the Songs of Maldoror by the Count of Lautréamont (published in 1869) resonates strangely in the face of Mari Katayama's sophisticated staging.
There is indeed surrealism – a surrealism that is sometimes "baroque" – in the self-portraits of the Japanese artist (born in 1987).
Photographic self-portraits where the wondrous rubs shoulders with the painful, and where wounded intimacy touches the universal. Having lost both legs at the age of nine due to a rare congenital disease that caused a malformation of her left hand, Mari Katayama has made art out of her abnormality. Transgressing the canons of beauty, she exhibits her damaged body, with or without prostheses, sublimated by adornments and other ornaments or accessories that she sews herself.
c-print, framed / 90 x 60 cm (35 3/8 x 23 5/8 in.) / ed 1/5 + 2 AP
Courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris © Mari Katayama
c-print, framed / 180 x 120 cm (70 7/8 x 47 1/4 in.) / ed 1/3 + 2 AP
Courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris © Mari Katayama
Courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris © Mari Katayama
Appearing as an octopus-woman in her Bystander series, where she sits on the beach adorned with tentacle-like prosthetics, in Shell (2016), she reigns amidst a deluge of gaudy trinkets alongside her hand-sewn double: a most unsettling mise-en-scène. Combining audacity and virtuosity, she goes so far as to show her legs in close-up in an almost abstract 2019 series entitled In the Water, where traditional criteria of beauty and ugliness shatter, giving way to a poetry bordering on the sublime.
Far removed from this abstraction, the Possession series, presented for the first time in France at the Suzanne Tarasiève Gallery, plays on preciousness and accumulation. The artist's personal objects are arranged against a black background to compose the setting for 22 photographs that blend self-portraiture with still life. This hybridization of genres allows Mari Katayama to explore the question of "possession"—of objects, but also of her body and her identity.
“HUSBAND KATAYAMA”
SUZANNE TARASIÈVE GALLERY
7, RUE PASTOURELLE, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL NOVEMBER 25, 2023
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@KATAYAMARI
