Point Reflection

Aki Sasamoto

Point Reflection follows Aki Sasamoto’s idiosyncratic practice, which draws on performance, dance, installation, video, and linguistic play to test the limits of our knowledge and experience of natural and human phenomena. Her improvisatory and experimental approach unravels her artistic research with curiosity, play, and pathos, revealing chains of associations that hold the most personal and mundane variables in tension with the most persistent and expansive metaphysical and scientific mysteries. Titled after the geometric condition wherein every point is reflected across a specific fixed point, Point Reflection asks how we identify and engage with moments of change, transformation, and rupture. In her writing on aging, vulnerability, the passage of time, and living a (non)normative life, Sasamoto turns to the metaphor of snail shell chirality–the direction in which the snail shell coils–to imagine the inverted horizon beyond the point reflection where all things are otherwise, but also still themselves, and ask, “When do you decide to go the other way?”

The first major volume devoted to the artist's work, Point Reflection combines the diagrammatic drawings, narrative experimentation, structured improvisations, and stream of consciousness monologues characteristic of Sasamoto’s performances and installations, with a critical essay by Lumi Tan, interviews conducted by the artist with biologists Erynn Johnson and Masaki Hoso, and an afterword by Queens Museum curator, Hitomi Iwasaki.

Point Reflection centers on Sasamoto’s installation Sink or Float, first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and previously on view as part of the solo exhibition, Aki Sasamoto: Point Reflection, at the Queens Museum, which presented a selection of recent works and a new performance by the artist.