Mortuary

Daisuke Yokota's pictures evoke the inhabited places, secret gardens, and inner spaces we all have inside us. His metaphorical conception of space - a fictional mental or lived-in place - immerses the viewer into a world hovering between presence and absence, oblivion and resurgence. Like a distant echo, the repetition and manipulation of the same body of works attest to his obsession with updating the tense flow of his own memories, translating this dynamic introspection into images with no beginning or end. His photographs suggest buried strata, hidden or repressed truths and lost links to the past.

Mouna Mekouar, exhibition curator


No detailed memory appears on my rolls of paper, just the recollection of confused feelings. I tend to see the world through those effects. Since I often photograph at night, I rely on senses other than sight, such as hearing. For example, I anticipate events or circumstances footsteps or an approaching car that might suddenly arise in my sound environment. Consequently, my attention is more on the background than on the subjects that originally should have been the focus. My sensorial impressions when shooting thus differ from my memories, and the gap between those sensations widens as time goes by. Photography sometimes manages to turn the spectacle of the present moment into a recollection, but it fails to capture my memory or emotions. That's why it seems indispensable for me to make those invisible things visible.

Daisuke Yokota


Exhibition view "Daisuke Yokota - Mortuary", Rencontres d'Arles, France, 2016 © Jean-Kenta Gauthier (Paris)

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