Opening Reception: June 18, 2025 | 7:00 PM
Live Performance: July 10, 2025 | 7:00 PM
m/Other is a meditation on kinship, the maternal principle, and Otherness—not as fixed categories, but as shifting, unstable forces. Moving between the human and non-human, organic and synthetic, Ibuki Kuramochi reimagines the maternal as a site of both intimacy and alienation, power and dissolution.
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s philosophy of companion species, this exhibition draws on Japanese custom to ask: What does it mean to mother—not a child, but an idea, a creature, a memory, a wound? Here, the uterus is not merely biological, but a conceptual matrix—a haunted space of inheritance, trauma, and transformation. The Japanese tradition of preserving the umbilical cord becomes a symbol of kinship that extends beyond bloodlines, into interspecies care and nonlinear histories. Kuramochi’s practice is grounded in Butoh—a form born from postwar collapse—whose physical language functions as a code for navigating grief, mutation, and metamorphosis. Through video, performance, and installation, she invokes the body as a porous vessel entangled with memory, ancestry, and technology.
In m/Other, the figure of the mother flickers—ghost, cyborg, companion, absence. Among them is the artist’s late dog, whose presence—tender, temporary, and now gone—informs this meditation on care, grief, and love. His life, and his passing during the preparation of the exhibition, remain intertwined with the work. The “/” signals rupture and multiplicity, opening space for fragmented lineages and speculative kinships. m/Other invites us to mourn, remember, and reimagine what care might mean now—across generations, species, and time.
