Kioto Aoki
Not quite the territory of light
Digitized b/w 16mm, video, sound
7 minutes
2025
A dance film made tangentially around the novel Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima. We follow the emotional spiral grounded in daily routine as the protagonist struggles to break from her past, ultimately resulting in a move towards regaining agency by moving down and away from the light.
Kioto Aoki (青木希音) is a Chicago-based artist, educator and musician whose studio practice navigates propositions of spatial and visual acuity through the explorations of the body in space. Vernaculars of conceptual photography and experimental cinema operate as tangential frameworks of analogue processes to negotiate visual and temporal propositions within the mundane. Her works balance the act of revealing and withholding along axes of sight and relativity, while body serves as an inflection point oscillating between assertions of personal, communal, cultural narratives. Her research-based methodology also integrates material, geographic and spatial histories into the conceptual and applied processes. Installations are arranged to emphasize and accentuate the relationship between the work, viewer and exhibition environment, often playing with the activation of two-dimensional images in a three-dimensional space. For more info, visit kiotoaoki.com.
This work is shared by Roman Susan as a part of Evergreen at 4750 N Sheridan Road, Chicago IL.