Artists

Saki Satom makes drawings, videos and installations. She explores the
behavioral norm and conventional wisdom, often focusing on codes and
practices that tend to go largely unnoticed. She is drawn to bland
urban spaces and day-to-day social rituals; the world she presents is,
on the face of it, a deeply familiar one. But in each of her works she
introduces a note of gratuity that calls everything around it into
question.

In Desk Project, for instance, she addresses a social convention in
terms that touch on both the experience of deracination and the
ritualistic character of social dialogue. The work consists of four
desks with monitors embedded in them, symmetrically arranged in a
pristine, carpeted room. Showing on the monitors are interviews, but
to view them the visitor has to crawl under the desks. In the
interviews, Satom quizzes four professionals on the subject of the
social kiss (what the French call la bise), asking them when and how
to greet people with a kiss, and how the custom varies from place to
place. Her interviewees–the French cultural attaché, an etiquette
teacher, a sociologist and the director of a communications
company–are sharp and articulate, but their answers occasionally seem
improvised and they unknowingly contradict one another. The piece
reminds us that in today’s globalising world, social codes are in flux
and cross-cultural exchange is still riddled with hitches and
embarrassments. The desks are crucial: they serve both as emblems of
the global corporation and as places of temporary refuge, like Tokyo’s
capsule hotels or the hideaways of children. And an understated humour
is discernible in the contradictory demands that are made on the
viewer–the piece offers advice on seemly behaviour while asking you
to adopt a position that is itself unseemly.

Apologies, another project that examines a public rite, is a series of
drawings and installations that describe and comment on gestures of
contrition. It looks at images of Japanese public figures who, having
been implicated in corporate and political scandals, issued apologies
in staged events that were then broadcast by the news media. The
project draws out the theatrical and ceremonial qualities of such
apologies by focusing on details of dress, presentation and gesture;
and to the extent that it treats these events as rituals, it suggests
that they form an accepted part of a process that is liable to repeat
itself–that they may even aid in its perpetuation. One installation in
Shazai Kaiken uses a filing cabinet as a framing device for a monitor
which sits in one of its drawers and shows clips of public apologies.
The cabinet refers to the practice of “filing away”–that is to say,
avoiding or deferring–difficult problems, while obliging viewers to
bend over slightly in order to see the monitor and so to reproduce the
bowed posture of the figures in the clips. This is a project that asks
us to consider the role in which we are cast when we consume images of
public events. It discreetly intimates that those images do not ask
for the indulgence of the public as much as they presuppose a kind of
tacit contract between public actors and their audience of TV viewers.
At a time when the credit crunch has brought apologies from bankers,
politicians and banking regulators in the West, the work is clearly as
resonant in Europe as it is in Japan.

Saki Satom was born in Tokyo. She lives and works in London.
She has shown at Tate Modern, London, and at the Museum of
Contemporary Art Tokyo, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, Timothy Taylor
Gallery, London, and many others.

Her recent solo exhibitions include 43 Inverness Street, 2011;
Taigh-Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre,2009; Gallery Pfeister,
Bornholm, Denmark,2008; One Severn Street, Birmingham,2005; Gasworks,
London,2005; Think Zone, Mori Art Museum, 2002; and Kojimachi Gallery,
Tokyo, 2000.