$50,000 Calder Prize Goes to Aki Sasamoto, Whose Absurdist Art Recently Appeared in the Venice Biennale

The Calder Foundation, with support from the Scone Foundation, has awarded the 2023 Calder Prize to New York–based artist Aki Sasamoto. Given every two years to “a contemporary artist whose innovative work reflects the continued legacy of Calder’s genius,” the award comes with $50,000 and a promise to place an artwork in a major public collection.

For more than a decade, Sasamoto has been combining her installation work, which often involves everyday objects, with performances that have an absurdist sense of humor. Most recently, she was featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she exhibited Sink or Float, in which commercial stainless-steel sinks were transformed into airflow tables with objects floating atop.

Delicate Cycle, which debuted at her 2016 exhibition at SculptureCenter in Queens, saw her memorably perform inside a commercial laundry machine and move a giant pile of clothing like a dung beetle.

“Aki Sasamoto uses everyday objects, movement, set design, and food in her performances to evoke the absurdity of the human experience,” Calder Foundation president Alexander S. C. Rower said in an email to ARTnews. “She improvises environmental elements such as equations or sounds in ways that are impossible to anticipate. This intangibility keeps us on our toes and somehow coalesces into magical coherence. The resulting energetics resonate with my grandfather’s own experiential art.”

Her work has also been featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 2010 edition of Greater New York, the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and the 2022 Busan Biennale. Though closely watched in the US, her work is currently only included in the permanent collections of museums in Japan, where she was born.

Sasamoto has a long history with the Calder Foundation, having first participated in a 12-hour program organized by the foundation called Oh, you mean cellophane and all that crap in 2012. In 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Atelier Calder in France, where she developed Squirrel Ways, which was included in the 2021 exhibition “Calder Now” at the Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands and which is currently being performed at American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

For that work, Sasamoto performs around a series of mobile walls. To them she adds everyday objects in her now well-known improvisational style, drawing out connections between Calder, the materials with which he worked, and the domestic setting of the atelier.

“When volumes exert their ownness,” she said of the piece, “and behave like living characters in our psyche, those sculptures truly occupy the same space as us. I like how sculptures can blur the line between art and life like that.”