YOUNG & EMERGING
MARI KATAYAMA
Pliant fabric limbs and loose skin tangle in a heap in Mari Katayama’s photography series “Bystander” (2016). Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art Gunma in 2017, the photos show the artist herself modeling an eerie, human-esque creature of handmade prosthetics. Sewn with fabric printed with images of hands—from an all-female, traditional puppet theater troupe—the soft sculpture sometimes envelopes the artist’s torso, or sprouts from her waist. In performative self-portraits such as these, Katayama carves out a private space for fantasies staged amid remote environments such as beaches, islands or in a domestic lair, using her own body as an artistic vessel to examine tropes of feminine identity, hybridity, narcissism and prosthetics.
Born with tibial hemimelia—a rare congenital condition that prevents the lower leg. In , she lies with an iPhone in her hand on a handmade pillow of shells, playing a modern-day punk version of Botticelli’s . Each of these acts restores the body in sculpture and births alter egos—ones that enable the artist to reclaim her own image. Studying human figures as sites of potential, Katayama examines the transhuman subject—marking the dawning epoch of a post-biological future with a cool indifference—and deconstructs the aesthetic ideals as narrated by society.
