reported to exist ll

2018

photo print, alluminium frame with plexiglass. size: 196 x 132 x 4 cm

hard cover book. size: 17.5 x 24.7 x 3.2 cm

REPORTED TO EXIST ll / 2018 » plays with the portrait of the artists, acting out the second version of their work "Reported to Exist". The new version unfolds in three venues: a large scale photograph, a film trailer, and a hardcover book. The act of transposition puts the former work in a dream state, letting reality flow into fiction, blurring the boundaries of waking and dreaming.

the garden : a collaboration of desire

2017

exhibition, plants, beewax, book, video performance

THE GARDEN : A COLLABORATION OF DESIRE / 2017 » Between the collaboration of flowers and bees lies an enigma which fascinates. Why do we end up meeting someone? The love-life of flowers seems to be completely absurd for us humans. Flowers seduce bees and other insects, beings of a completely different kind. The artist duo, Sayaka Ohata and Joseph Mayrhofer-Ohata, tried to explore these illogical collaborations which happen in our gardens. Nevertheless, the garden, full of wild flowers, plants and small animals, a place of pollination, resistance, and refinement, was not the main focus when their project was first being developed. Initially, the interest artists lay in working on connections between love, life and light. But over the course of the process, the garden (as a collective intelligence) ultimately made its way to the fore - as a subject that, in a certain way, includes perfectly these three subjects and extended them into an unknown territory. Sayaka and Joseph are a married couple and work together, and this project became at the same time the occasion to explore their own collaboration as an artist duo through a garden like installation, a video performance and a book.

for my ancestors (formal attempt)

2016

showcase, installation, book, video performance

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FOR MY ANCESTORS / 2016 » was inspired by attending a traditional Japanese memorial festival (Obon) in Oregon. Mayrhofer-Ohata found the experience to be uncanny in its unfamiliar rendering of a very personally familiar ceremony, and sought to create an immersive installation in her studio at Yale Union based on this feeling. In its presented form, "For My Ancestors" saw a constellation of found and created symbolic materials including sculptures made from vegetables which decayed over time, an animated video suspended from the ceiling, an artist book, and footstep silhouette cutouts on the floor mimicking the circular motion of an Obon dance. These objects filled artist's studio bathed in a soft pink light, acting as tools to suggest the passage of spirits between worlds. (text by Matt Jay)

grounds, maps and birdhouses

2016

exhibition, painting, book, video performance

GROUNDS, MAPS AND BIRDHOUSES / 2016 » took place in Finland. In the very beginning, it was an original exploration of the surface commonly accepted as the ground for traditional art - the canvas. While developing and perfecting a technique which allowed us to remove or pull off the « gesso », the foundation of images, we extend this approach into a video work and a book on the issue : this process allowed us to open up a multifaceted platform which deals not only with the instability of the foundation of images but also with people, who have lost any ground to stand on. (Play)groundlessness was in this sense a key narrative of the project. Through an installation, a book and a video performance, we discovered the beauty of instability, impermanence and resistance.

you have reached the point

2015

public performance, book

YOU HAVE REACHED THE POINT / 2015 » was a site specific, collaborative project that involved the community surrounding a part of the Mae-Klong River, Thailand. Interested in a small ferryboat which connects a military territory and the Ratchaburi city-center, we invited spontaneously local habitants to shoot balls from each embarkment point and to record this event with their smartphones. The river was transformed into a playground : people from each side initiated an unexpected constellation on the floating ground.

reported to exist

2015

exhibition, book, video

REPORTED TO EXIST / 2015 » is the exhibition of an artistic research project which took place at ‘the end of Thailand’ close to the border to Myanmar. We discovered a landscape photograph in the National Museum of Ratchaburi which showed a strange place where two small streams merge. Everyone we asked couldn’t tell us where it had been taken. So we tried to find the reference of this photograph. This project takes the journey to Suan Phueng District for its raw material and to question the tension between fiction and reality within documentary. By staging the concrete, empirical movements by a video-work, a book and multiple sculptural installations, we were interested to take the viewers beyond the here and now of the photograph into different layers of space, time and probability.

speech bubbles

2015

installation, book, video performance

SPEECH BUBBLES / 2015 » deals with language and its contemporary uses. 3 installed videos with "click of tongue"-sounds and a ping-pong machine which throws out ping-pong-balls like speech-bubbles plays with the metaphor of how coming into the world is like coming into language. The exhibition space became a platform of exchange and hospitality. During the exhibition, the audience was invited to become, by playing ping-pong, part of the work.

under the edge of the firmament (the friend fails to show)

2014

installation, book, video

*Headphones are recommended to capture the hole sound structure.

UNDER THE EDGE OF THE FIRMAMENT / 2014 » A scenario in the tropical aquarium, housed in the museum of immigration in Paris (Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, Porte Dorée) was the very beginning of this adventure which explores the curious silent force which pushes our imagination to act. Audacity begins in a state of weakness, of vulnerability : it is the urge to react, to create. The microcosm of a small fish triggered the poetic point that opens up new horizons in-between real and virtual worlds. The fact that reality happens  while editing on the desktop. We don't take reality, we create reality.We are putting things together with audacity. One of our references was a very strange wood engraving in a famous and popular 19th century book of astronomy (Flammarion) made by an unknown artist. It can be probably seen as a metaphorical visualization of either the scientific and the mystical quests for knowledge : the traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament. Things keep appearing : audacity!

in search of white

2013

polaroid

IN SEARCH OF WHITE / 2012 » is a work-in-progress project about the disposition of the sun in the white sky. It is a mise-en-scène of a poetic thought using instant pictures. The luminosity of the sun burns a bubble in the white space of the photo and disposes a rhythm in the empty space.

licking, liking, linking

2016

installation, book, video

LICKING,LIKING,LINKING / 2016 » is a reenactment of the Boris-Groys-text Words beyond Grammar. Three randomly chosen people taste words out of this text first published on the occasion of documenta (13). This way to perform the philosophical text provoked a shift towards the sensitive body and opened up a fresh dimension : tasty knowledge from dissolved grammar.

hinterland

2014-

painting without painting

HINTERLAND / 2014- » is a painting without painting. It is an exploration of the invisible land behind the white painting surface of canvas. A land in-between. We are interested in the discovery of new horizons in the media of painting itself and last but not least because it is beautiful. We think that the term "Hinterland" (arrière pays) refers to this area.

something follows me (the visit)

2014

video, performance

SOMETHING FOLLOWS ME / 2014 » is a work in progress video performance project which negotiates the relationship between subject and object and questions the real and the illusory elements within that relationship. The artist follows the course of a thrown ball in an environment. By inverting (or reversing) the movements of the ball and the artist, we see a ball which takes exactly the same way as the artist. Suddenly, in a mysterious way of precision, the artist is followed by a ball. The performer as "subject" seems to be "active" but the ball as "object" is also "active" while at the same time it is "passive". In this way, what we mean when we say "subject", becomes complicated. Subject and object become both potential controllers. (the video is coming soon…)

inner dance (that makes the world go round)

2014

video

INNER DANCE / 2014 » is a perpetual video loop on a mobile phone exploring the third-space in-between two people. Aesthetically relating to Oskar Schlemmer’s « Triadic Ballet », the clip shows two people moving their bodies spontaneously without thinking and dancing together as close as possible without touching. The moment of effectiveness, when the creator and what is created fuse, seems to be an indeterminable non-place inside of the gap : how to open a path to the Other?

codex

2013

interactive art

workshop

2014-

Thanks to all participants and the support team of incheon art platform.

CODEX / 2012 » is a "work in progress" project on sharing our memories in code format. We provide personal information in what we call Internet. Our hairs also allow us to determine identity. In a kind of workshop, participants arrange their own hairs according to a barcode format and preserved their voices. Intimate memories in their native language can be read with a scanner. This data will continue to grow and pass on from generation to generation.

ma

2012

book

間 MA / 2012 » is a book project of space exploration about white paper which took place at the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto. The white sheet of paper invites us to imagine something… The text fragments follow the rhythm of the garden. In-between, we can sense time-space : a sense of space.

landscaper

2012

performance

LANDSCAPER / 2012 » is an exploration of space which took place at the the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto and negotiate the disposition of a human in the void. Demonstrating the idea of designing space in a poetic way, the performance was trying to transform the idea of the void into its material foundation. By physical gestures, the artist empties the box by painting the walls white. She dumps the empty box into her space. Letting things come to silence…

open hieroglyphs

2015

book

OFFENE HIERO-GLYPHEN (Martin Andersson)/ 2015 » is published on the occasion of an artistic collaboration: text by Martin Andersson and established and presented by Mayrhofer-Ohata.

on art (objet trouvé)

2014

ON ART (OBJET TROUVÉ)/ 2012 » is a found piece which led on the floor of the parisien underground nr8: « Some time ago, a new generation of artists born in the 1980s and marked by the influence of unlimited access to knowledge, to artistic creation at a time when the principle of inter-disciplinary in visual arts seems to be a given, with unlimited possibilities. What was involved for those artists was making use of a new « site specific » basis. These artists reject the notion of site-specific art. What is more, their approaches and methods regard as acquired the principle of re-materializing a world which nevertheless thinks of itself as immaterial. »

cama-icons

2013

photo