Video installation that emerged from the exploration of weeping in response to fictional films and the so-called paradox of fiction—the curious phenomenon by which fiction evokes emotions, even when one is well aware that the fictional worlds do not exist beyond the narratives that frame them. The installation presents a series of tearful faces, juxtaposing a cry triggered by a fictional film, one by a personal memory or experience, and another by cutting an onion.

A short sci-fi film set in the near future where two ex-lovers sit together, absorbed in a censored version of a porn film they once watched uncensored. Their exchange unfolds between the plot of the film and how pixels aren’t what everyone thinks. As they chat, their past intimacy lingers in the air.

Video work exploring a fictional romantic story as a way to trace some of the pathways through which romance is commodified today. Created between Osaka and Kobe, Japan, in collaboration with a rental boyfriend named Natsuto, the video piece unfolds as a fragmented narrative through our smartphones, documenting two perspectives of a staged romance.

What happens when we are able to experience a fictional narrative of romance outside the frameworks of a film, a play or the pages of a novel, and it steps into our own ‘reality’? Does this kind of romantic fiction deserve an audience – beyond its two protagonists? While delving into what being and having a fictional boyfriend might look and feel like, with this work I also explore how narratives of romance and intimacy are increasingly curated, performed for a public and consumed in our hyper-connected society. 

A bossa nova song playing in the background, the sound of air shaken by a fan. Every now and then, the flipping of a magazine page, water poured in a paper cup, a candy being unwrapped. A Ladybug on Your Hand recalls a waiting room, but it is not your usual waiting room. Rather, it is a liminal space where the audience is invited to take a break from the abundance of stimuli of everyday life and tune in to their interior. The TV monitor and magazines displayed in the room point to a living archive of mental images that one would not likely encounter in media, but may manifest in social and material reality. These images are connected to the realm of the sensible as much as they are to the creative potential of imagination. 

Video work offering the visualization of an image, one pixel at a time. Turned into a moving image and projected into a square-shaped wall, the image becomes simultaneously hyper-visible and avisual – not perceptible to the human eye. A voice-over meditates on whether an image that never emerges in its entirety might enable “to see” more. In doing so, the voice-over moves the focus towards the images that are carried and produced in one's imagination, while drawing a parallel between image production and desire production.

This video work explores the potential of the loading time or “dead time”—the time when the internet connection is momentarily interrupted—as a mode of subverting the logic of productivity underlying everyday cinematic experiences that take place online. The three screens, each one embodying a consciousness, are put in conversation with one another. Adopting a critical and humorous approach, questions concerning the entanglement of time, presence, desire, pleasure, leisure, productivity and visuality come to surface.

Site-specific intervention where the usual magazines in a waiting room are replaced with new, alternative magazines. These alternative magazines propose a literary exploration that plays with the viewer’s mental imagery. Beginning with what recalls a photo report that could easily belong to a typical waiting room magazine, the narrative swiftly transitions into evoking a story that is both strangely intimate and relatable to the experience of waiting.

In this video work a person narrates the moment of her own death. When she sees the famous bright white light at the end, she soon understands something: the light is actually formed by the images of her entire lifetime. With this premise, The Light explores how subjectivity is produced in and through images. In doing so, it also addresses the cultural and temporal aspects of the images that flow in the imagination. In the present-day hyper-visual world, are there any images that remain invisible or unseen? To what extent do we share our mental images with the other?

For more documentation on any of the works, get in touch at kivasakona@gmail.com