This exhibition of photographs by noted artist Ishiuchi Miyako reconstructs the show she presented at the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. One of the Biennale's highlights, the show contains a series of moving photos of her deceased mother's personal belongings.

Ishiuchi’s early oeuvre focuses on buildings and street scenes, but in 1990 she shifted to photographs of the human form, starting with the group of works titled 1•9•4•7, which featured close-up photographs of the hands and feet of women born the same year as Ishiuchi (1947).  The artist’s own words in the accompanying catalogue illuminate her continuing preoccupations with time and decay: 'The hands, feet and face are always exposed to the air that surrounds the body and thus are subject to gradual destruction by the elements and time. The body, like a vessel which only receives what is given into it, accepts whatever time and the elements do to it. Things that make a body unique seem to gather at the extremes of the body.'
 

Ishiuchi Miyako mother's #49 2002
Collection Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
© Ishiuchi Miyako