During the Prose Readings literary festival, Mako Isizuka, a Japanese artist living in Sweden, will visit Riga. Within three days, from December 5 to 7, the artist will create a “Map of Thoughts” based on the Riga experience and will create and exhibit a “Bookshelf” at the ISSP Gallery. The opening of Mako Isizuka's exhibition and an Artist Talk with curator Inga Lace will take place on December 7 at the ISSP Gallery.
Mako Ishizuka is a Japanese-born Swedish artist who attempts to intervene in the psychological and physical distances that emerge where the everyday meets the world, using her own experiences and imagination as a springboard. Her view is communicated in a personal manner, taking various forms, such as visual installation, social project, act, essay, and combination of them. Having lived in various societies as “others”, Mako started to work on the project After-Ripening & Corruption, started in 2014, which revolves around the cultural and language translations in the lives of people moving. Playing with rules, norms, and logics in a foreign context, she scoops up the shades in the process of movements such as emotions, deviations, and assumed errors.
"I search for personal idioms that “resonate”, appreciating encounters and detours, to invite people to look afresh at their never-disputed worldview and stiffened values, and tailor their own relationship with the surrounding world."
In Riga, on the windows at ISSP Gallery, Ishizuka plans to expand her "map of thoughts" in relation to her research around language and cultural translation in Riga and to the context of the festival of Prose readings. She would reflect on the relation between the way one looks at the world and one's mother tongue and develop her thoughts inspired by the practice of other Japanese writers in the festival. With the groups of young people, she would develop discussion, inquiring participants' experiences around reading and generating image(s) in relation to their language(s).
Mako Ishizuka studied interdisciplinary studies (culture/philosophy/sociology) in Japan and free art at Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands and Malmö Art Academy in Sweden. For her projects, she has received opportunities such as residencies at IASPIS in Sweden, Cité des Arts in France, Cittadelarte in Italy, Capacete in Brazil, and the Bag Factory in South Africa, and Production Prize from Pistoletto Foundation. She has presented her practice in various places such as at Fittja Pavilion at 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice, "Frictions in the Globalisation” at EHESS (Institute for Higher Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris, and “Connecting Scapes” at Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
