The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is pleased to present Maya Erin Masuda’s first UK solo exhibition, Sleep, Lick, Leak, Deep….. Through an understanding of the precarious nature and fluxes of the planet we reside in, Masuda suggests alternative, imaginative forms of more-than-human entanglements that embrace ambiguity, multiplicity, and the queer.

In her body of work, Masuda takes an intimate look at contemporary ecological trauma and biopolitics seen in particular chemical infrastructures or nuclear catastrophes. Born in Tokyo and based in London and Berlin, Masuda has often likened skin, the highly personal, physical and emotional boundary which living beings possess, to the national, necropolitical borders artificially constructed by human societies. For Masuda, her research trips to ecologically damaged sites are a liberating experience, deconstructing the discrepancy between an institutionalised human-planetary exploitation and her own sensations, brought about by finding the unbearable ecological intimacy embedded within. In this exhibition, Masuda thus provides a poetic, ontological breath which fosters a sense of interspecies belonging and points to the non-autonomous essence of all living agents.

About the contributors

Maya Erin Masuda

Maya Erin Masuda (b. Tokyo, JP, she/her), is a Berlin/Tokyo/London-based, queer interdisciplinary artist. Masuda brings her speculative ecological intersubjectivities to life through storytelling via film, performance, writing and time-based installation. Throughout her work, she delicately poses questions upon techno-biopolitics through probing various planetary traumas and chemical infrastructures, seen in diverse spatiotemporal sites such as in nuclear catastrophes. As an artist who has a background in machine engineering, Masuda proposes affective, sensual, intimate sites of knowledge production which interweaves non-human, marginalized and symbolic. Developing a kinship with the imperfect and political nature of technology, her work provides interspecies belongings and care as well as reparative attention across all beings, while suggesting an alternative futurity that negates anthropocentrism. After Obtaining her MA from Royal College of Art (UK), she currently researches post-nuclear culture in relation to new media at Universität der Künste Berlin (DE) under Prof. Nina Fischer.

• Offficial Website: https://mayamasuda.net/
• Instagram: @maya__erin

Admission free

Related events:
Private View: Sleep, Lick, Leak, Deep…. by Maya Erin Masuda
Thursday 30 May, 6pm-7pm