New York installation artist Aki Sasamoto has been named this year’s Calder Prize winner. The honor, given biennially to “a contemporary artist whose innovative work reflects the continuing legacy of Calder’s genius,” is followed by a $50,000 prize; a three-month residency at Atelier Calder, Alexander Calder’s former studio in Saché, France; and placement of the winner’s work in the collection of a major institution.
“Aki Sasamoto uses everyday objects, movement, set design and food in his performances to evoke the absurdity of the human experience,” said Calder Foundation President Alexander SC Rower. “She improvises environmental elements such as equations or sounds in a way that is impossible to anticipate. This immateriality keeps us on our toes and somehow merges into a magical coherence. The resulting energetic resonates with my grandfather’s own experiential art.
Born in 1980 in Yokohama, Japan, Sasamoto collaborates with visual artists, musicians, choreographers, dancers and scholars to produce works that respond to their surroundings. Among his works, note those of 2016 Delicate cycle, which saw her climb inside a commercial washing machine and mimic the hoarding behavior of a beetle, or dung beetle, moving over a large pile of laundry. For its 2021 installation Squirrel manners, which she developed during a previous residency at Atelier Calder, she created a series of movable wooden panels that together evoked a living room, in which she performed: the work, conceived in the wake of the pandemic, had to investigate both the permeability of barriers. ” There is . . . a stubborn materiality to Sasamoto’s sculpture that resists metaphorical elevation”, writing art forumIt’s Chloe Wyma.
Sasamoto is the ninth artist to win the Calder Prize, established in 2005. Past winners include Rosa Barba, Jill Magid, Haroon Mirza and Darren Bader.
