Hiraki sawa dwelling live community

Hiraki Sawa’s videos explore psychological landscapes, unexpected worlds and the interweaving of domestic and imaginary spaces.  Populated with animals, inanimate objects and people, his characters search for their ‘place’ in the universe as he explores ideas of memory, displacement and migration. 

Sawa is perhaps best known for an early animated work titled Dwelling (2002), completed while he was still in graduate school, in which airplanes take off, land, and travel throughout the interior space of an apartment.  Gregory Volk, in the essay for an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2005, wrote: “The more one spends time with the work…the more psychologically eventful these airplanes are, as they proceed on their inscrutable routes, seemingly at their own volition.

Whether zooming in to microscopic details in a work or zooming out to the monolithic effort of a career, Sawa’s overall enterprise coheres both formally and thematically. Unlike the toy planes in dwelling, which launched his career almost two decades earlier, this act reads as a resolute declaration of the artist’s continued engagement with themes of time, place, memory, and consciousness that have remained central throughout his practice.

They conjure a solitary apartment dweller’s drifting, multiple thoughts—a transportation in and of the mind, including random memories, hopes, nagging reminders of pressing tasks, and strange bursts of enthusiasm that come from nowhere in particular.”

More recently, Sawa embarked upon a project entitled Figment, a collection of works which comprises a group of increasingly surreal videos about the phenomenon of amnesia.

His IOTA series (2016) incorporates photographs from his grandmother’s albums, transformed into stamp-like images and overlaid with white ink patterns, reconstructing an imagined past. Sawa says he hopes time spent in the building ‘brings about a transformation of attitudes, such as unbridled imagination, resilience and restoration of creativity gained from the experiences there’.

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Hiraki Sawa, based between London and Kanazawa, creates works that combine moving image with sculptural and two-dimensional elements.

One of the works in this series, Lineament (2012) is a two-channel video installation in which a male protagonist navigates a worn apartment. Painted in fluoro colours, these can be used to open or close spaces on the upper floor. Its concrete walls, floors and pipework have been left as is, with the studio installing moveable plywood walls to divide up the rooms.

In absent (2018), hybrid entities such as winged spoons and animated scissors appear, transforming familiar landscapes into the uncanny. While studying sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, he encountered animation software by chance through helping a friend, which led to his first video work dwelling (2002).

Among them are the trickery and gifts of memory, the way time can pass at different speeds, and the tightly woven relationship between objects and emotional cues. The series takes its inspiration from, and is an ongoing means of processing, the sudden-onset and complete memory loss of one of the artist’s friends. Sawa’s ambitions quickly evolved beyond this work/play parameter towards a more holistic and hybrid ‘co-being’ space that is both a home and a place to facilitate the creative process.

The task of making the building habitable fell to London firm Ab Rogers Design, who used a less-is-more approach to transforming the office into a hybrid residency.