This exhibition was the largest presentation to date of Mariko Mori’s work in Britain.
The Serpentine Gallery presented distinct but related bodies of recent works in an installation conceived by the Tokyo-born artist Mori especially for the show. The exhibition included Nirvana, Mori’s acclaimed 3-D video featured in the 1997 Venice Biennale. Mori also used pioneering solar technologies to create a prototype ‘enlightenment capsule’. This meditation sculpture was lit by sunlight entering the gallery through a Himawari, a device for catching and transmitting the sun’s rays.
The walls of the domed North Gallery featured a series of five-metre-long, multi-panelled photo-panoramas that comprised glass-mounted, computer-manipulated images, which originated in diverse locations such as the Gobi Desert, the Dead Sea, a wind-power station in California and Arizona’s Painted Desert. In addition, the Serpentine premiered a new video filmed over the previous 12 months in the mountain forests of Japan.
