After 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 as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. " Adopted by the Surrealists, this famous line from Comte de Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror (published in 1869) echoes strangely in Mari Katayama's sophisticated staging.
There is indeed a surrealism - a sometimes "baroque" surrealism - in the self-portraits by the Japanese artist (b. 1987).
photographic self-portraits, where the marvellous rubs shoulders with the painful, and wounded intimacy touches on the universal. Amputated from both legs at the age of nine due to a rare congenital disease that left her with a malformed left hand, Mari Katayama has made a work of her abnormality. Transgressing the canons of beauty, she shows off her damaged body, with or without prostheses, sublimated by finery and other ornaments and accessories 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 we see her sitting on the beach wearing tentacled prostheses, in Shell (2016), she is enthroned in a deluge of glittering junk alongside her hand-stitched double: a most unsettling staging. 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 are shattered to make way for poetry bordering on the sublime.
Far from this abstraction, the Possession series, presented for the first time in France at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, plays with preciousness and accumulation. Accumulation of the artist's personal objects set against a black background, creating the backdrop for 22 photographs that blend self-portraiture and still life. A hybridization of genres that allows Mari Katayama to pose the question of "possession", of objects, but also of her own body and identity.
" MARI KATAYAMA"
GALERIE SUZANNE TARASIÈVE
7, RUE PASTOURELLE, PARIS 3E
UNTIL NOVEMBER 25, 2023
SUZANNE-TARASIEVE.COM
@KATAYAMARI
