Unit 2 Gallery

HANA SAKUMA
100 Books Which I Didn't Buy

29 April – 10 June 2005
Private View: Thursday 28 April 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Thursday 12 May 4-6pm

100 Books Which I Didn't Buy features Hana Sakuma's recent sculptures and new ventures into video. As such, this exhibition provides audiences with a significant opportunity to experience the breadth and depth of Sakuma's practice.

From the middle through the middle, an ongoing series of small handmade objects offer an insight into what the writer Richard McRae describes as 'short moments for our consideration'. The apparent simplicity of these works belies their quick-witted humour and observation. In sharp contrast, the large-scale sculpture died like a gentleman offers a more foreboding presence in the gallery. A blackboard, suspended within an ingeniously designed wooden contraption, contains handwritten but partially erased literary references to death. The seating at either end of this structure suggests a certain functionality but on closer inspection it appears to be merely a flamboyant device employed to symbolise the social and cultural mores that surround mortality.

100 Books Which I Didn't Buy and Haiku-like Poems represent something of a departure for Sakuma, both materially and conceptually. The fastidious processes evident in much of her sculptural work are superseded by an apparent spontaneous yet clinical use of photography and video. Whilst this new-found directness still typifies Sakuma's desire to provoke and bemuse, the act of viewing appears all the more integral to these anxious and sometimes comical acts of translation.

The exhibition includes an accompanying brochure with a newly commissioned essay by Richard McRae.

The exhibition has been supported by London Metropolitan University, Arts Council England, London, Japan Foundation and the Japan European Union 2005.

Gallery opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 12-6pm and by appointment