After the MEP studio in 2021, here are the disturbing textile and photographic works of Japanese artist Mari Katayama presented in the Project Room of the Suzanne Tarasiève gallery.
"Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Adopted by the Surrealists, this famous line from Comte de Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror (published in 1869) echoes strangely in Mari Katayama's sophisticated staging.
There is indeed a surrealism - a sometimes "baroque" surrealism - in the self-portraits by the Japanese artist (b. 1987). Photographic self-portraits in which the marvelous rubs shoulders with the painful, and wounded intimacy touches on the universal. Amputated from both legs at the age of nine due to a rare congenital disease that left her with a malformed left hand, Mari Katayama has made art out of her abnormality. Transgressing the canons of beauty, she shows off her damaged body, with or without prostheses, sublimated by finery and other ornaments and accessories that she sews herself.
Appearing as an octopus-woman in her Bystander series, where we see her sitting on the beach wearing tentacled prostheses, in Shell (2016), she is enthroned in a deluge of flashy junk alongside her hand-sewn double: a most unsettling mise-en-scène.
Combining audacity and virtuosity, she goes so far as to show her legs in close-up in an almost abstract 2019 series entitled In the Water, where traditional criteria of beauty and ugliness are shattered to make way for poetry bordering on the sublime.
Far from this abstraction, the Possession series, presented for the first time in France at Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, plays with preciousness and accumulation. Accumulation of the artist's personal objects set against a black background, creating the backdrop for 22 photographs that blend self-portraiture and still life. A hybridization of genres that allows Mari Katayama to raise the question of "possession", of objects, but also of her own body and identity.
"Mari Katayama
Suzanne Tarasiève Gallery
7, rue Pastourelle, Paris 3e
Until November 25, 2023
@katayamari