Ayakamay. HOTEL KAMIKAZE

About

After World War II the word “Kamikaze” became synonymous with Japanese suicide pilots and filled Americans with anger and hate.

The traditional meaning of “Kami Kaze” is a completely different and a positive one. “Kami Kaze” is sacred figure of the Divine Wind an ethereal being, a deity whose breath and wind creates energy that moves weathervanes, fans and flags, birds and insects, a positive deity creating a temporal freedom for all touched by this spirit.

Ayakamay’s installation in Hotel Kamikaze creates eternal temporary non-space: a comfortable place to address this still-present discomfort in the common past between East and West, between Japan and the United States. This sacred wind, still trapped, threatens to be caught in the lightness of the air like a cloud or a mirror that shows us how difficult it is to find commonalties when we hold onto our preconceptions and cannot reconcile our histories.

Ayakamay will present a stand-alone long-duration performance in the DSC Annex on the evening of Friday, May 19th.  The artist invites us to penetrate this singular hotel, a place dyed to a certain redness between the sanguine and the carnal, an unsettling surface that we see crossing the planes of image and the space, a red that seduces and deceives us with its violent passivity that emulates our voyeurism making us blind to what is secreted in the being of things.

Ayakamay combines image-making with fantastically constructed but intimate live experiences. The staged, costumed worlds of studio photography and videography are combined with interactive performances engaging the unpredictability of encounters with strangers and exchanges of physical senses and emotional states. Ayaka’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.