LONDON, UK.- Gasworks Gallery is pleased to announce the first UK solo presentation of video and installation work by Japanese artist Saki Satom. Satom’s work explores patterns of human behaviour that are particular to large urban centres, often focusing on codes and practices that tend to go largely unnoticed. She creates situations that allow her to interact with the public in ways that unexpectedly expose those patterns and cast them in a fresh light. And her works highlight minor incidents that turn out, on closer examination, to be surprising, even at times extraordinary. She says of her practice; “I want to view our daily routines from a slightly different angle and by so doing show that they may hold hidden possibilities.”

For Gasworks, Satom will present four works in a specially constructed installation. These will include From B to H, a video work which shows a dancer pirouetting to canned music in a lift in Tokyo, and Slalom, a three-screen projection, which offers multiple views of the business world. Shot in three different locations, the footage in Slalom shows a series of three revolving doors with the same smartly dressed woman (the artist) walking round and round as she follows the rotation of the door. Her apparently senseless activity becomes harder to distinguish from the focused and purposeful traffic of the businessmen and women who brush past her. Another piece, Ala Kawa, explores family history, memory and storytelling.

Gasworks Gallery has commissioned Satom to make a new work, entitled Desk Project, specially for the exhibition. This work consists of a series of desks with monitors installed within them. On each monitor is a video of an interview which can only be viewed from under the desk; the interviews explore the subject of social greetings in the West. Satom has interviewed, among others, the French Cultural Attaché and an etiquette teacher, asking them to outline the appropriate greetings for different situations. The piece examines the experience of displacement in an increasingly global society, while also hinting that social customs start to seem odd, even faintly absurd, if you look at them too closely.

To accompany the exhibition Gasworks Gallery will publish a catalogue which will include a commissioned essay by David Elliott, Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. This publication will document the exhibition as well as acting as a retrospective catalogue of Saki Satom’s career to date. This bi-lingual catalogue will be the first comprehensive publication documenting Satom’s practice.