Hiroharu Mori (Japan) – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Hiroharu Mori

• is a perpetual traveller, rootless and detached, but with a keen critical eye, a marked sense of economy and a healthy taste for the absurd. Having returned home to Japan after years of living abroad, Hiroharu Mori confesses to feeling like a stranger in his native country without ever really having adjusted to being anywhere else.
  • Working largely in video, installation and public interventions, Mori makes critical works that comment on the mechanics of mass culture. Through his ongoing exploration of slippages in translation, questions of identity and the tensions and contradictions of everyday life, Mori never loses sight of the capacity contemporary art has for poetry and play. 
• Mori has a Bachelor of Art from Tama Art University, Tokyo Japan, 1994. In 2000 he completed a Masters of Fine Art at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, USA and in 2004 a Master of Science (Visual Studies) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
  • Since 1998 he has exhibited widely both internationally and in Japan, received a number of awards and undertaken residencies in Australia, USA, Germany and Korea. His selected solo exhibitions include: his speech, hiromiyoshii, Tokyo, 2009 and Hiroharu Mori is detached from the outside world, Artspace, Sydney, 2007. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including: Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense at the Venice Biennale in 2007; Dazzling, Hollowness at The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo, 2010.
• Hiroharu Mori is a co-founder of the organization Artists’ Guild launched in Japan in 2009. The organization creates a support system to provide and share video and film equipments for the emerging artists to help their independence: http://artists-guild.net/