About
CHRISTIAN FERREIRA is pleased to present the first collaborative installation by British artists Tom Milnes & Sabine Okami in the Accumulator Tower at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Titled, Kioku, this ambitious installation sees Milnes & Okami working with personal elements relating to emotional memories felt through disconnection.
Using a retelling of the 2011 Japanese earthquake as experienced by Okami's grandparents as a starting point, they explore issues of memory, translation and migration by weaving personal narratives into everyday Japanese convenience-food products and placing it in an unnerving environment. By mirroring the now disused warehouses of the area, which used to be filled with exotic produce from the Far East, Milnes & Okami fills the space with shelves stacked with the re-interpreted copies of Japanese convenience-food products. Each of the re-interpreted products are made from a wood-block print which has been loaded with family histories and as such creates a hybridized product which is then organised and stored away.
By stepping into the claustrophobic space, filled with the re-interpreted produce that seem at once familiar, yet exotic and foreign, the viewer will be exposed to an unexpected shudder of the shelves that transforms the space into one of angst and creates a feeling of imminent danger.
Tom Milnes was born in 1984 in Torquay, UK and now lives and works in London. Milnes received his MFA degree at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Sandberg Instituut and has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including, Aging, De Appel, Netherlands; The Colony, Kunsthuis SYB, Netherlands; Obsessions, Modern Art Oxford, UK, The Dump, Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia, Gdansk, Poland and The Young Dialogue, CEAC, China.
Sabine Okami was born in 1986 in Winchester, UK and now lives and work in London. Okami graduated at Oxford University and completed a further degree at Camberwell College of Arts. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and in Europe.
