To mark the opening of Sleep, Lick, Leak, Deep…. by Maya Erin Masuda at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, we are delighted to host an online artist talk, Maya Erin Masuda in conversation with Johnny Golding.

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 talk, Maya Erin Masuda and Professor Johnny Golding will discuss Masuda’s artistic motivation and her recent projects, in which Masuda takes an intimate look at contemporary ecological traumas and biopolitics seen in particular chemical infrastructures or nuclear catastrophes.

About the contributors

Maya Erin Masuda

Maya Erin Masuda (b. Tokyo) 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 installations. Throughout her work, she delicately poses techno-biological questions by probing various planetary traumas and chemical infrastructures seen in spatiotemporally diverse sites such as nuclear catastrophes. As an artist who has a background in machine engineering, Masuda proposes affective, sensual, intimate sites of knowledge production which interweave the non-human, the marginalised and the symbolic. Developing a kinship with the imperfect and political nature of technology, her work provides interspecies belonging and care as well as reparative attention across all beings, while suggesting an alternative future that rejects anthropocentrism. After obtaining her MA from the Royal College of Art (UK), she is currently researching 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

Professor Johnny Golding (moderator)

Professor Johnny Golding (moderator) is a London-based philosopher/poet and the Director of the proto-Centre in Radical Matter: Art, Philosophy, Wild Science at the Royal College of Art, and holds the Chair in Philosophy and Fine Art at the RCA. Johnny is the Principal Lead on two AI labs with Hong Kong Polytechnic (AI as Distributed Intelligence and AI in Real-world storytelling). Latest book: Data Loam (sometimes hard, usually soft): The future of knowledge systems (de Gruyter: 2023). Latest hologram/video/poem: Octopussy: King of the Pirates (Feminist Version), at the international exhibition/symposium: Radical Matter: when materialism is no longer enough (Angewandte, Vienna: 2024).

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