Mariko Mori - Oneness

In autumn of 2007, ARoS had a unique opportunity to show an exhibition by the Japanese artist Mariko Mori.

With her high-tech and interactive art that combines Buddhist meditation with cyber-fantasies, Mariko Mori has gained worldwide recognition and popularity for her spiritual and spectacular works. The exhibition at ARoS was the first to show Mariko Mori in a large-scale exhibition in a Danish museum. In close collaboration with the artist, ARoS succeeded in bringing a number of Mariko Mori's main works to the country in an intense and innovative exhibition that took the form of a meditative journey through Past, Present and Future. The exhibition spanned several floors.

Mariko Mori's works combine spirituality, mass culture, design, science and high technology, bringing a Japanese cultural tradition with its concept of animated nature into a hypermodern context.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was Wave UFO from 2003: a large and tightly designed spaceship that combines computer graphics, sound, architectural engineering and technological brain research in a dynamic, interactive experience. Three people at a time had the opportunity to be sent into the spaceship.

Here, the connection between technology and spirituality was sharpened through the use of specially designed computer programmes and equipment that measured the three people's brain activity and converted these into images on the ceiling of the spaceship. If all three achieved the meditative calmness of the brain, they would be visually connected to each other.

The Buddhist tenet that all forms of life in the universe are interconnected found a powerful and contemporary expression here.

This transcendental attention to the connection between the material, spiritual and technological worlds was the backbone of the exhibition, which took the form of two tracks: a series of early photo panels and a three-dimensional film in which a number of Japanese and Buddhist symbols were set in a cyber-like future scenario; and a series of more recent, interactive sculptural works and spatial installations based on ancient ritual sites such as Stonehenge.

These high-tech stone formations are logged on supercomputers in Tokyo, and their appearance is therefore dependent on the tides or the movement of celestial bodies.

The exhibition was realised in close collaboration with the artist and the Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Netherlands. In connection with the exhibition, a book by Mariko Mori was published. The book can be purchased in the ARoS Shop.

Mariko Mori was born in 1967 in Tokyo, Japan. From the late 80s, Mori studied design at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo and worked as a model at the same time. In 1989 she moved to London and continued her studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design. When she moved to New York in 1992, she enrolled in the independent programme at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since then, Mariko Mori has been based in New York and Tokyo.

In 1995, Mariko Mori made her international breakthrough with a series of large, manipulated photographs in which she staged herself in a kind of civilisation-critical modern pop universe. Throughout the 1990s, she had numerous exhibitions at MoMA, Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Rooseum, Malmö; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Dallas Museum of Art, USA.

She has participated several times in the Venice Biennale, most recently in 2005, where her Wave UFO was the centrepiece of the exhibition. Wave UFO was a result of the shift Mori made around 2000, working less with photography and video and more with sculpture. However, most of her works are also performance pieces, where Mori performs self-directed performances with her own clothing designs in close collaboration with Japanese composers.

Mariko Mori is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim, Centre Georges Pompidou and MoMA. She has published numerous books and exhibition catalogues.

Mariko Mori is represented by Jeffrey Deitch, New York, Albion, London, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and SCAI, Tokyo.