“Maybe sometimes tomorrow comes before today.
Or maybe one minute is sometimes longer than a week.
Or can time have a smell?
I have always been fascinated by the sense of time, ever since I was a little girl.”
- Miho Kajioka
‘All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.’ - Kurt Vonnegut.
IBASHO is proud to present the second solo-exhibition of Miho Kajioka in Antwerp, which exhibition is following her books in the series ‘so it goes’. In 2018, Kajioka started this series, which aimed to visually share her perception of time and confuse people in a poetic and amusing way. Through her intuitive photographs Kajioka is playing with the concept of time in different ways. In the exhibition she shows installations that question the chronology sequence of situations. Kajioka became especially interested in this theme after reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novel ‘Slaugtherhouse-five’. Like Vonnegut, Kajioka wonders if the order of time is always in the same chronology, or is it possible that past, present and future change in sequence?
Kajioka skilfully creates poetic and suggestive unique works through alternative printing methods in the darkroom. Her images evoke a sense of mystery in her constant search for beauty. The focused and respectful way in which she approaches the medium of photography seems to fit in the tradition of Japanese photography that is characterised by the specifically Japanese sense of beauty: wabi sabi. Wabi has been described as ‘serene attention to simple things’ and sabi as ‘beauty acquired through the patina of time’. Her book ‘so it goes' won the Prix Nadar in 2019, and Kajioka, IBASHO and the(M) èditions have since published three more books in this series. This exhibition features images from the existing four books, as well as images from future books.
Miho Kajioka (b. 1973, Japan, lives in Paris) studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and began there as a painting major, but little by little turned to photography. She finished her fine arts degree in Montreal, Canada. However, she began her career as a journalist, producing TV news and documentary programs for foreign news outlets, and didn’t produce art for more than 10 years. It was after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that Kajioka was reconnected with her photographic art. Two months after the disaster, while reporting in the area, Kajioka found roses blooming next to a blasted building. That mixture of grace and ruin led her to create art that celebrates beauty in daily life. Kajioka’s work has been exhibited in Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the USA, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
