GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary is delighted to present an exhibition by the Japanese, New York based artist Mariko Mori. Mori will show works from the Primal Particles and Parallel Brane series alongside the Miracle installation at BALTIC from Wednesday 21 May – Sunday 14 September 2008.

The exhibition in the Level 2 space consists of two adjacent rooms. The first providing a space for contemplation and consideration of Mori’s delicate works on paper from the Primal Particles and Parallel Brane series. Mori’s recent interests in Brane cosmology and particle theory have informed these iridescent drawings and paintings. Moving into the second room you encounter Miracle. Typically Mori has used newly developing technologies in the production of 8 diachronic images on glass. The work aims to awaken people’s deeper consciousness, making them aware of different realities by asking them to think about being in a present that coincides with the past and the future.

Mariko Mori is perhaps best known for her self-portraiture focusing on the imagination and fantasy. Seen by many in the west as a Post-modern critique of materialist culture, her early work explored clichés concerning eastern spirituality and a move to a global culture. Her investigation into the ways that hope and belief, regret and neglect are interwoven, explores the notion that there is never one single way to look at idea.

Her work has since focussed on native cultures and universal consciousness in relation to nature. Mori argues that we must be in touch with our own culture to understand others. She sees modern technology as a substitute for local belief and argues its increasing importance. With a sincere belief in the potential power of technology, Mori argues for its use to make our lives better. She sees an advance of technology as a tool for evolution, as in ancient civilisations. Mori suggests that in the last century technology became separated from utopia enabling science and
technology to advance without any acknowledgement of the destruction of natural resources. Mori believes that technology can put us back in touch with nature.

Mori’s work in recent years, such as the examples on show at BALTIC, has become more abstract, exploring consciousness and investigating the existence of an invisible world. With the belief that the universe is constantly experiencing its own life and death, Mori’s work investigates the idea of reoccurring space and eternal life. With the belief that life and death, past and future are merged for eternity, her work reaches for a shared consciousness which has no borders.

Born in Tokyo in 1967, Mariko Mori attended London’s Chelsea College of Art upon graduating from Tokyo’s prestigious Bunka Fashion College.

In 1992 she enrolled at New York’s Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Emerging as one of the ‘undisputed stars’ of the 1997 Venice Biennale, four major 1998 solo shows followed on: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Mori was the only woman artist featured in 2000’s Apocalypse at the Royal Academy in London, where she exhibited Dream Temple, originally commissioned and displayed by the Prada Foundation in 1999.