This event will provide the opportunity to have a first look at the work of AKI INOMATA and hear her discuss with Dr Lena Fritsch the ideas and inspiration behind her work.

The show will centre around one of INOMATA’s most recent projects, Memory of Currency (2018-2021) and introduce her practice, which for many years has involved collaboration with non-human creatures such as hermit crabs, bagworms, octopuses and ammonites. Her works encompass a wide range of media, from sculptures and prints to video works, as she always attempts to find the best method to present the process of co-working with specific animals.

INOMATA rejects the division between humans and other species, and attempts to overcome it by creating unexpected re-encounters with otherness. Born and reared in urban environments where human beings are isolated from other animals, she engages in a conscious self-critique of humans as an authority assuming the power to control the world we live in, ignoring and excluding uncontrollable others.

Memory of Currency is a project in which INOMATA collaborated with pearl oysters to create currency ‘fossils’. INOMATA implanted artificial nuclei into the tissues of the pearl oysters, with the shape of each nucleus modelled on the portrait of a figure depicted on one of today’s major currencies, such as Queen Elizabeth II, George Washington and Yukichi Fukuzawa. The figures symbolise the monetary economy and also reference historical narratives – civilisation, colonisation, slavery, and the removal of indigenous people, among others. Accompanying the pearl portraits produced by the oysters, the video installation shows footage of the pearl oyster shells sinking into the ocean, stimulating the imagination to think beyond the present time. By creating a meeting between oysters and the manmade concept of capitalism, INOMATA questions if this economic system and this way of narrating history are the only ways to situate ourselves in this world.

As we struggle amid economic recession and the alarming situation of the climate crisis, Autobiographical Animals reminds us of our entangled existence in this world and encourages us to be more imaginative and to relearn our relationships with other species.

<Text by Haruna Takeda>

About the contributors

AKI INOMATA

AKI INOMATA (1983) is an artist based in Tokyo. Aware that the act of ‘making’ is not exclusive to human beings, INOMATA creates artworks ‘collaboratively’ with various species. She investigates relationships between animals and human beings, and the creations emerging from them. Her major works include Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?, in which she created 3D-printed shells for hermit crabs and handed them over to the crabs, and I Wear the Dog’s Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair, in which the artist and her dog wear capes made from each other’s hair. Her recent exhibitions include Broken Nature, MoMA (2021, New York, USA), AKI INOMATA: Significant Otherness, Towada Art Center (2019, Aomori, Japan), The XXII Triennale di Milano (2019, Italy), Thailand Biennale 2018 (Krabi), and AKI INOMATA, Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?, Musée d’arts de Nantes (2018, France). Her works are included in the collections of MoMA, the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Dr Lena Fritsch

Dr Lena Fritsch is the Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford), working on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions of international art. One of her main research areas is Japanese art and photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. Before joining the Ashmolean, she was a curator at Tate Modern. In 2018 Fritsch published one of the first overviews on Japanese photography in English: Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (English version with Thames & Hudson, Japanese with Seigensha). Other publications include Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021), A.R. Penck: I Think in Pictures (2019), an English-language version of Moriyama Daido’s Tales of Tono (2012), The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s (2011), and Yasumasa Morimura’s Self-Portrait as Actress (2008). Fritsch holds a PhD from Bonn University, and also studied at Keio University, Tokyo.

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